Everything about Morphological Typology totally explained
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see
linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. First developed by brothers
Friedrich von Schlegel and
August von Schlegel, the field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form
words by combining
morphemes. Two primary categories exist to distinguish all languages:
analytic languages and
synthetic languages, where each term refers to the opposite end of a continuous scale including all the world's languages.
Analytic languages
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.
Analytic languages include some of the major
East Asian languages, such as
Chinese, and
Vietnamese. Additionally,
English is moderately analytic (probably one of the most analytic of Indo-European languages).
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's 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).
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 highly regular.
Agglutinative languages include
Korean,
Hungarian,
Turkish,
Japanese and
Luganda.
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 (for example
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. A remarkably high degree of fusionality is also found in certain
Sami languages such as
Skolt Sami.
Polysynthetic languages
In 1836,
Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a third category for classifying languages, a category that he labeled
polysynthetic. (The term
polysynthesis was first used in linguistics by
Peter Stephen DuPonceau who borrowed it from chemistry.) These 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". Of course, this is rather useless as a defining feature, since it's
tautological ("other languages" can only be defined by opposition to polysynthetic ones, and vice versa).
Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic.
Inuktitut is one example, for instance the word-phrase:
tavvakiqutiqarpiit roughly translates to "Do you've any tobacco for sale?".
Note that 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.
Morphological typology in reality
Each of the types above are idealizations; they don't exist in a pure state in reality. Although they generally fit best into one category,
all languages are mixed types.
English is synthetic, but it's 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.
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