Information resources for contrastive studies: typological databases

This article presents information resources used in contrastive linguistic studies and their principle features. There are two main types of such information resources: typological databases and electronic text corpora. The attention is focused on typological databases, which can be subdivided into general-purpose typological databases and specialized typological databases. General-purpose typological databases act as repositories of a wide range of data on a wide variety of languages. They may be utilized as reference resources and may also be helpful while dealing with language classification problems. Specialized typological databases are used for closer investigation of specific language phenomena in restricted sets of languages. They supply detailed models of such phenomena and include examples to illustrate their functioning in the considered languages. The paper also looks into problems related to development of typological databases and to integration of data from heterogeneous typological databases.