Morphological typology
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Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as one word.
Analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages can all be found in many regions of the world. However, each category is dominant in some families and regions and essentially nonexistent in others. Analytic languages encompass the Sino-Tibetan family, including Chinese, many languages in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and West Africa, and a few of the Germanic languages. Fusional languages encompass most of the Indo-European family—for example, French, Russian, and Hindi—as well as the Semitic family and a few members of the Uralic family. Most of the world's languages, however, are agglutinative, including the Turkic, Japonic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages and most families in the Americas, Australia, the Caucasus, and non-Slavic Russia. Constructed languages take a variety of morphological alignments.
The concept of discrete morphological categories has been criticized. Some linguists argue that most, if not all, languages are in a permanent state of transition, normally from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again. Others take issue with the definitions of the categories, arguing that they conflate several distinct, if related, variables.
History
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The field was first developed by brothers
Analytic languages
Analytic languages show a low ratio of
Analytic languages include some of the major
Additionally, English is moderately analytic, and it and Afrikaans can be considered as some of the most analytic of all Indo-European languages. However, they are traditionally analyzed as fusional languages.
A related concept is the
Synthetic languages
Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the root, or they may not. They may be fused with it or among themselves (in that multiple pieces of grammatical information may potentially be packed into one morpheme). Word order is less important for these languages than it is for analytic languages, since individual words express the grammatical relations that would otherwise be indicated by syntax. In addition, there tends to be a high degree of concordance (agreement, or cross-reference between different parts of the sentence). Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than syntax. Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic.
There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology).
Fusional languages
Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from the root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into one affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by internal phonological changes in the root (i.e.
, which are of course inseparable from the root.The
Agglutinative languages
Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be individually identified. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high number of morphemes per word, and their morphology is usually highly regular, with a notable exception being Georgian, among others.
Agglutinative languages include
.Polysynthetic languages
In 1836,
Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic; indeed, most of the world's polysynthetic languages are native to North America.
Oligosynthetic languages
Oligosynthetic languages are ones in which very few morphemes, perhaps only a few hundred, combine as in polysynthetic languages.
In constructed languages
Fictional languages vary among J. R. R. Tolkien's languages for the Middle earth universe, for example, Sindarin is fusional while Quenya is agglutinative.[6] Among engineered languages, Toki Pona is completely analytic, as it contains only a limited set of words with no inflections or compounds. Lojban is analytic to the extent that every gismu (basic word, not counting particles) involves pre-determined syntactical roles for every gismu coming after it in a clause, though it does involve agglutination of roots when forming calques.[7] Ithkuil, on the other hand, contains both agglutination in its addition of affixes and extreme fusion in that these affixes often result from the fusion of numerous morphemes via ablaut.[8]
Interconnectedness
While the above scheme of analytic, fusional, and agglutinative languages dominated linguistics for many years—at least since the 1920s—it has fallen out of favor more recently. A common objection has been that most languages display features of all three types, if not in equal measure, some of them contending that a fully fusional language would be completely
Cyclical evolution
Other linguists have proposed similar concepts. For instance,
WALS
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) sees the categorization of languages as strictly analytic, agglutinative, or fusional as misleading, arguing that these categories conflate multiple variables. WALS lists these variables as:
- Phonological fusion – how intrinsically connected grammatical markers are phonologically to their host words[13]
- Formative exponence – the number of categories expressed in a single marker (e.g., tense + number + gender for verbs in some languages)[14]
- Flexivity – allomorphy and inflectional classes such as possessive classification[15]
These categories allow to capture non-traditional distributions of typological traits. For example, high exponence for nouns (e.g., case + number) is typically thought of as a trait of fusional languages. However, it is absent in many traditionally fusional languages like
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-177-52533-6.
- ISBN 978-0-521-29875-9.
- ISBN 978-0-19-512595-5.
- ^ Bybee, Joan. "Semantic Aspects of Morphological Typology" (PDF). University of New Mexico. Retrieved November 14, 2014.
- ISSN 0138-550X.
- ISBN 9789197350013.
- ^ "Chapter 4: The Shape Of Words To Come: Lojban Morphology". Lojban.org. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
- ^ "Chapter 2: Morpho-Phonology". Ithkuil.net. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
- ^ Garland, Jennifer (2006). "Morphological Typology and the Complexity of Nominal Morphology in Sinhala" (PDF). University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved December 8, 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-521-62654-5.
- ^ van Gelderen, Elly. (2011). The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- ^ van Gelderen, Elly. (2013). The Linguistic Cycle and the Language Faculty. Language and Linguistics Compass, 7(4), 233–250.
- ^ "Chapter Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives". WALS. Retrieved August 5, 2014.
- ^ a b "Chapter Exponence of Selected Inflectional Formatives". WALS. Retrieved August 5, 2014.
- ^ "Chapter Possessive Classification". WALS. Retrieved August 5, 2014.
External links
- "Linguistic typology" (PDF). (275
- The book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir (1921) contains a classic introduction to the subject.
- Japanese Morphological Analysis API Japanese Morphological Analysis API by NTT Resonant