- •Introduction
- •Is that morphosyntactic variation is both highly constrained and highly
- •Identified by its syntactic structure as predominantly analytical.
- •Iranian languages; and so on. Members of a language family have a
- •Iranian, and the extinct Hittite and Tocharian. Further subclassifications
- •Indo-European language system is marked by more or less elaborate
- •It is not understood why word orders with the subject before the
- •Invention of arbitrary new items, borrowing new morphemes in these
- •Verbs. And Boy and boys, for example, are two different forms of the
- •In English). So, the lack of grammatical affixes in English is
- •Is obligatory. Therefore grammatical categories is an important
- •Is used to indicate singular objects or referents that can be neither
- •Instrumental, Locative, Vocative).
- •Indefinite objects. A definite object is one that the speaker expects the
- •3) The absence of the article before the countable noun in the plural,
- •Verbs also often reflect the gender of their subject nouns and,
- •Is partially semantic (Ukrainian animate nouns have semantic gender
- •Verbs with their past stems and the past participle formed by way of
- •Infinitive may denote a sheer intention or assurance, annoyance based
- •Including prepositional ones can be used in the passive (the preposition
- •In both languages phrases may be elemental, with one type of
- •In English, dominant in practically all subordinate phrases is the
- •Information mostly through inflection, allows relative flexibility which
- •It a problem to miss out obligatory parts of the sentence. The omission
- •In spite of the one-man show, the game was out of reach. Kyle
Indo-European language system is marked by more or less elaborate
systems of inflections, one of the most complex of which appears to
have been exhibited by Proto-Indo-European. Most modern Indo-
European languages display both internal inflectional change and
external affixes, often simultaneously in a single word (as German
Männer from Mann or English sold from sell).
Extremely synthetic languages, where words are very complex and
sometimes constitute entire clauses, with extensive use of inflection,
derivation and compounding, are called polysynthetic (or incorporating).
This category for classifying languages was proposed in 1836 by William
Humbotdt. A polysynthetic language is one in which objects, indirect objects,
and other sentence elements are incorporated into the verb as one word.
Swahili does this, as in hatukuviwanunulia, which means “We did not buy
them (= things) for them (= people).” The components of this word are ha
(negative), tu (“we”), ku (indicator of past), vi (“them,” meaning “objects”),
wa (“them,” meaning “people”), and nunulia (“buy for”). Polysynthetic
languages are primarily found among Eskimo and American Indian
languages, as well as a few languages in Siberia, Northern Caucasus and
Australia.
Theoretically speaking, languages may locate themselves at any
point on the scale from analytic to polysynthetic:
Analytic
Synthetic
Polysynthetic
(word = orpheme) (word > morpheme) (word = clause)
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).Thus, synthetic and polysynthetic languages may be
further subdivided into agglutinative and flectional languages.
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In the ideal case, an agglutinative language (from the Latin for “to
glue to”) is a synthetic or a polysynthetic language in which words are
composed of roots, and one or more affixes (prefixes at the beginning,
infixes in the middle, and suffixes at the end of words) with distinct
meanings. The essential feature of agglutinative languages is that affixes
are characterised by a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and
form and have distinst boundaries. An example is Turkish, which has äv
(“house”), ä-vdä (“in the house”), äv-lär (“houses”), and äv-lär-da (“in
the houses”).
In an almost ideal case like Turkish, agglutinative languages exhibit
all of the following two properties, while flectional languages exhibit
the opposite properties:
1. Each morpheme expresses only one meaning element. This is the
opposite of cumulation, typical of flectional languages, where each
morpheme expresses more than one meaning element, such as in
modern Greek raf-ete ‘was being written’, where the suffix -ete
expresses five different meaning elements: 3 rd person, singular, passive
voice, durative and past tense (the same is observed in Ukrainian).
2. There is a clear-cut boundary between each morpheme. The
opposite is known as fusion. In fusional (flectional) languages, the basic
and added parts have merged, as a result of phonological processes.
Characteristic of inflection are internal word changes, such as English
ring, rang, rung, and the use of affixes that are fused to their roots,
having no independent existence or meaning, such as ід-е, ід-уть). On
the contrary, the affixes of agglutinative languages tend to be more
independent than the affixes of flective languages. For instance, the
Turkish plural suffix -lar (or -ler) sometimes applies not only to single
words, but to whole phrases: bayan ve bay-lar (‘ladies and gentlemen’).
The distinction between such affixes and separate function words is not
always easy to draw.
Historically, flective morphology is usually derrived from
agglutinative morphology, which in turn is derrived from the analytic
use of function words:
analytic agglutinative flectional
This does not mean, however, that analytic languages are more
“primitive” than flectional languages. In fact, many Indo-European
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languages, including English, have long been in the process of
becoming more analytic, discarding most of the complex flective
morphology of earlier historical stages.
Thus the existing morphological types of languages can be briefly
described in the following way:
1. Analytic languages show a low ratio of words to morphemes; in
fact, the correspondence is nearly one-to-one. Sentences in analytic
languages are composed of independent root morphemes. Grammatical
relations between words are expressed by separate words where they
might otherwise be expressed by affixes, which are present to a minimal
degree in such languages. There is little to no morphological change in
words: they tend to be uninflected. Grammatical categories are indicated
by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for
interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example,
a word for “some” or “many” instead of a plural inflection like English -
s). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are
expressed by other words. Finally, in analytic languages context and
syntax are more important than morphology. Highly analytic languages
are primarily found in East and Southeast Asia (e.g. Chinese,
Vietnamese), as well as West Africa and South Africa. English is
moderately analytic (probably one of the most analytic of Indo-
European languages).
2. Agglutinative languages have words containing several
morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one other 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 highly regular. Agglutinative languages
include Korean, Turkish and Japanese.
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.morphophonology), such as consonant gradation and vowel
gradation, or by suprasegmental features such as stress or tone, which
are of course inseparable from the root. Most Indo-European languages
are fusional to a varying degree.
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3. 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.
4. Polysynthetic languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, a
highly regular morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include
morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject
(polypersonalism). Another feature of polysynthetic languages is
commonly expressed as “the ability to form words that are equivalent to
whole sentences in other languages”. Many Amerindian languages are
polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one example, and one specific example is the
phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit which roughly translates to “Do you have any
tobacco for sale?”. No clear division exists between synthetic languages
and polysynthetic languages; the place of one language largely depends
on its relation to other languages displaying similar characteristics on
the same scale.
Each of the types above are idealizations; they do not exist in a pure state
in reality. Although they generally fit best into one category, all languages are
mixed types. English is less analytic than Chinese, but it is more analytic than
Spanish, and much more analytic than Latin. Chinese is the usual model of
analytic languages, but it does have some bound morphemes. Japanese is
highly synthetic (agglutinative) in its verbs, but clearly analytic in its nouns.
For these reasons, the scale above is continuous and relative, not absolute. It
is difficult to classify a language as absolutely analytic or synthetic, as a
language could be described as more synthetic than Chinese, but less
synthetic than Korean.
That is why recent morphological typology is based on the
traditional typology, but instead of distinguishing four distinct language
types it operates with two independent variables, index of synthesis and
index of fusion (B.Comrie, L.J. Whaley). Index of synthesis (IS) refers
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to the amount of affixation in a language, i.e., it shows the average
number of morphemes per word in a language. It can be illustrated by
means of a scale, the end points of which are an isolating language and a
(poly)synthetic languages:
Isolating ______________________________________Synthetic
Each language falls on a given point on the scale. The languages in
which synthesis dominates are on the right side and those with weak
morphology on the left side on the scale.
Index of fusion (IF) refers to the ease with which morphemes can be
separated from other morphemes in a word. Agglutinative languages
have a low index of fusion, while in fusional languages it is high. In
agglutinative words segmentation can be performed readily due to clear
morpheme boundaries. In fusional words segmentation is difficult or
impossible. Index of fusion also can be illustrated by means of a scale.
The extremes are now agglutinative and fusional languages.
Agglutinative Fusional
All languages except for isolating languages fall between the two
extremes. In isolating languages, by definition, there are no
agglutinative or fusional morphological processes. Table 1 presents the
index of synthesis for eight languages. For each case, the figures are
calculated on the basis of 100 words of an unrestricted text sample.
Vietnamese is close to an ideal isolating language and its index of
synthesis is close to 1.0. Eskimo is a highly polysynthetic language, its
index of synthesis being high. The other sample languages fall between
Vietnamese and Eskimo.
Table 1
Language Index of synthesis
Vietnamese 1.06
English 1.09
Old English 1.68
Swahili 2.55
Turkish 2.86
Russian 3.33
Eskimo 3.72
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In the world’s languages, the most usual inflectional categories of
nouns are number, grammatical case, and grammatical gender. These
are the main morphological phenomena that affect the indices of
inflectional synthesis and fusion.
Table 2 shows the number of morphosyntactic features in the
category of case for 8 languages: Hungarian has 21 features. In English
there are only 2 features (nominative and genitive; genitive is marked).
Finnish represents a language with a high index of synthesis. This is
due, in particular, to the high number of morphosyntactic features in the
category of case (14 features). Because different affix types can be
combined with one another in a single word, the number of word forms
that a given Finnish lexeme may take is very high. The concept of
grammatical case is not relevant to all languages, it is alien to isolating
languages.
Table 2
Language Number of features in case
English 2
Finnish 14
German 4
Hungarian 21
Lithuanian 7
Russian 6
Sanskrit 8
Serbo-Croation 7
Thus, according to the existing morphological classifications, the
English language may be defined as a slightly synthetic fusional
language developing towards the highly isolating (analytic) type like
Chinese while the Ukrainian language may be characterised as a
predominantly synthetic fusional language.
Modern English shares the following typical features of analytic
languages:
1. Predominantly monosyllabic morphemes (and sometimes words).
2. Conversion (a word may shift part of speech with no change of
form).
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2. Extensive use of tonemes (the functional load carried by word
length in many synthetic languages tends to be carried by tonemes in
analytic languages).
3. Extensive use of function words.
4. Relatively fixed word order. (In a language without inflection,
function words and fixed word order carry some of the information that
is taken care of by inflection in synthetic languages).
5. Less rigid grammatical rules. As an example of a language with
less rigid grammatical rules, consider the following facts about Chinese:
• It has no inflection.
• Subject and object are often optional.
• Function words are often optional.
• Word boundaries and sentence boundaries are fuzzy.
• Apart from the noun-verb distinction, word class distinctions are
fuzzy.
A mildly synthetic language like English is much more rigid than
Chinese: a speaker of English is constantly forced to decide whether he
wants to talk about objects in the singular or the plural, and whether he
wants to talk about events in the present or the past. The same type of
rigidity lies behind the obligatory presence in many modern European
languages of a subject. Even in sentences with no logical subject, a
formal subject is required, such as in the English sentence It rains. This
is different from Chinese, which has neither obligatory subject nor verb
inflection.
Syntactic classifications. In addition to morphological properties,
languages differ from each other in syntactic features. In the syntactic
typology of Greenberg languages are divided into different types
according to so called basic word order, often understood as the order of
subject (S), object (O) and verb (V) in a typical declarative sentence
with a transitive verb. This is one of the most commonly discussed
typological distinctions in modern linguistics. The vast majority of the
languages of the world fall into one of three groups:
SOV (Japanese, Turkish etc.)
SVO ( Chinese, English etc.)
VSO (Arabic, Welsh etc.)
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Logically speaking, there should be nothing wrong with the three other
possibilities: VOS, OVS and OSV. However, they are exceedingly rare
and typically occur in areas that have been relatively isolated. Less than five
percent of the world’s languages belong to one of the three remaining
possible types: VOS, OVS and OSV. In other words, the subject precedes
the object in more than 95 percent of all languages. In fact, the subject tends
very strongly to precede both the verb and the object, and according to one
study, SOV and SVO together are found in more than 85 percent of all
languages, while VSO is only found in around 9 percent. Other studies give
different figures, but the tendency is the same. So the most common types
are SVO and SOV languages. In addition to sentence structure, the structure
of syntactic phrases may vary between languages. In English NPs (noun
phrases) are of the type AN (adjective, noun) while in French NPs are
predominantly of the type NA.
Other languages, such as Latin and Finnish, have no fixed word
order; rather, the sentence structure is flexible. Nonetheless, there is
often a preferred word order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside
of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent. In languages with
this kind of flexible word order, the order of words in given sentence
does not reliably indicate a noun’s grammatical role, so nouns typically
change their form to indicate their role (which is known as case
declension).