Chapter 9 Romancel anguages and linguistic typology Romancel anguages and linguisticsThis chapter is dedicated to Coseriu'sw ork on individual issuesi np articularl anguages as well as to his conception of linguistic typology.A sw ew ill see, it is surprising that thetwo fields are connected by acommon principle: historicity.Coseriu'swork on the Romance languagestraces their history or describes, explainsand systematises historical facts that can be found in different languages.The historical evolution and the synchronic view on systems are but two sides of the same coin, and thes ynchronic projection is alwayss implyap articular view on historicity.It includes,a sw eh aves een in chapter 4, all levels of synchronic analysis (see also Albrecht 2021): the norm as well as the system, and finallythe language type (section 9.2).Coseriu was never a "fieldworker" in the classical sense.He was of rural origins, but even his work on dialectology and linguistic geographyi st heoretical rather than empirical.However,i tw ould be too simplistic to consider him an "armchair linguist" in thesense of this classical and reductive binarism.His insistenceonthe individuality of particular languagesnot onlyderivedfrom his affinity for German idealistic philosophy,b ut also -in accordancew ith German idealistic philosophers -from his own individual knowledge of manyl anguagesa nd his pleasure of speaking and readingt hem.Coseriu was not onlyi nterested in structures and grammars,heenjoyed discovering languages, practicing them, and living within them: theR omance languagesa sw ell as the classic languagesL atin and Greek, the Slavic languages, German, English and even Japanese.He was an admirer of literature and considered it to be worth learning alanguage just to be able to read its poetry in the original version.When he arrivedatthe University of Rome, he tried to profit as much as possible from the wide rage of language courses available.D uring his Italian and earlyU ruguayany ears, he translated ag reat deal, doing so from various languages(Romanian, Slavic languages, German, amongothers) also into languagest hat weren ot his mother tongue, Italiana nd Spanish (which in fact he considered to be his second and third mother tongues).As alanguagelearner,hewas an interested observer of language phenomena, of language structures as well as of idiosyncratic constructions,p hraseologisms and lexical particularities.He not onlyp ublished severals tudieso np articular linguistic phenomena mainlyfrom Romance languages, but also dedicated asignificant amount of his teachingt oi ssues in particular languages, often doing so in thev ery lan-