From contrastive linguistics to linguistic typology

The paper looks back at Hawkins (1986), A comparative typology of English and German, and shows, on the basis of raising and human impersonal pronouns in English, Dutch and German, that contrastive linguistics can be viewed as a pilot study in typology. It also pleads for doing the contrastive linguistics of three languages rather than of two, not least because the third language can teach us something about the other two.