Morphological Types of Languages Lecturer: Abrar A. Mujaddidi

Languages are often classified according to the way in which they put morphemes together to form words. There are two basic types of language structure: Analytic languages Synthetic languages

Analytic Languages Analytic or Isolating languages are called so because they are made up of sequences of free morphemes- each word consists of a single morpheme, used by itself with meaning intact. Analytic languages do not use prefixes or suffixes. Sentences in analytic languages are composed of independent root morphemes.

cont., 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).

(1) Vietnamese (Comrie 1981: 43) Khi tôi ðèn nha ban tôi, When I come house friend I ‘When I came to my friend’s house, chùng tôi bǎt ðâu làm bài. PL I begin do lessen ‘we began to do lessons.’

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. English is moderately analytic (probably one of the most analytic of Indo-European languages).

Synthetic Languages In synthetic languages, affixes or bound morphemes are attached to other morphemes so that a word may be made up of several meaningful elements. 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 synthetic.

(2) Kirundi (Whaley 1997:20) Y-a-bi-gur-i-ye abâna CL1- PST-CL8.them-buy-APPL-ASP CL2.children ‘He bought them for the children.’

1. Agglutinative Languages Synthetic Languages are divided into two types: 1. Agglutinative Languages 2. Fusional Languages 3. Polysenthetic 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 etc.

(1) Turkish (Comrie 1981: 44) SG PL Nominative adam adam-lar Accusative adam-K adam-lar-K Genitive adam-Kn adam-lar-Kn Dative adam-a adam-lar-a Locative adam-da adam-lar-da Ablative adam-dan adam-lar-dan

Morphemes in fusional languages (inflectional, flectional) are not readily distinguishable from the root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into one affix. Most Indo-European languages are fusional to a varying degree.

In East Norwegian past participle [sva:t] 'answered' where the verb root [sva:r] is combined with the suffix [t], but where [r] + [t] becomes [t] by phonological rule, fusing the two morphemes together.

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. Another feature of polysynthetic languages is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences in other languages".

he-person-nice ‘He is a nice person.’ An example of a polysynthetic language is Mohawk. r-ukwe’t-í:yo he-person-nice ‘He is a nice person.’

Thank you 