Led by Bernard Comrie, the Department of Linguistics studies the diversity of human language and the historical processes underlying this diversity. The researchers are interested in “language universals”, i.e. properties that are common to all human languages, and “language typology”, i.e. properties in which languages differ from each other. Why are language universals and cross-linguistic variation the way they are? To this end, various phenomena across a wide range of languages are studied, and reference is made to formal properties of language, to the cognitive bases of languages, and to aspects of language in use. Grammatical and lexical features are studied, taking into account regional peculiarities, therefore, field work is an important tool of linguistic research.