Week 10: Typology

English Morphology

Fernanda Barrientos

2025-01-07

What is typology?

  • What morphological processes do the languages of the world exploit?
  • Do languages use similar morphological patterns in syntax or phonology?
  • Is there a relationship between morphology and language family or geographic location?

Typology

Linguistic subfield that attempts to classify languages according to kinds of structures, and to find correlations between structures and genetic or areal characteristics.

The fourfold classification

Isolating languages

  • In isolating languages, each word consists of one and only one morpheme.
  • A good example of an isolating language is Vietnamese:
    • Nouns do not inflect for number
    • The verb does not inflect for tense, so we need to add an adverb such as “tomorrow” or “yesterday”.

Agglutinative languages

  • In agglutinative languages, words are easily segmented into separate morphemes, where each of them carries a single chunk of meaning.
  • Example: Turkish
    • The plural morpheme -ler and the genitive -in is easily distinguishable in the form ev-ler-in (“of the houses”)

Fusional languages

  • In fusional languages, morphemes are not necessarily easily segmentable: several meanings may be compressed into one single morpheme
  • Example: Latin
    • Unlike Turkish, genitive and plural are part of one morpheme
    • In the word form puellarum, the morpheme -arum conveys both plural and genitive
    • Also the boundary between base and affix is a bit blurry

Polysynthetic languages

  • In polysynthetic languages, words are frequently extremely complex, consisting of many morphemes, some of which have meanings that are typically expressed by separate lexemes in other languages
  • In these languages it is possible to form complex words which consist of full sentences
  • Example: Nishnaabemwin

Indices: how do we measure it? 📏

  • The index of synthesis: how many morphemes are there per word in a language?
    • Isolating languages will have few or even only one morpheme per word
    • Agglutinative or polysynthetic languages will have many morphemes/word
  • The index of fusion: to which degree are morphemes phonologically separable from their bases?
    • Isolating and agglutinative languages have a low degree of fusion, since the phonological boundaries between morphemes are clear
    • Languages with templatic morphology are higher on the index of fusion

Indices: how do we measure it? 📏

  • The index of exponence: how many meanings or inflectional features can be expressed simultaneously in a single morpheme in a language?
    • Turkish has a low exponence, but Wari’ would have a very high index:

Head and dependent marking

  • We can also look at the way morphology signals the relationship between words in phrases
  • The main element in each syntactic phrase is called its head; the head of a noun phrase (NP) is the noun, the head of a verb phrase (VP) is the verb, etc.
    • Elements that combine with the head in a NP are the dependents of the head, e.g. adjectives, determiners, or possessives
    • dependents of a verb in the VP can be its subject or object
  • Languages can choose to mark relationships between the head and its dependents:
    • exclusively on the head
    • exclusively on the dependent
    • on both, or neither

Head and dependent marking

Head vs. dependent marking

If the relationship is marked by some morpheme on the dependent, this is called dependent-marking, and if it is marked on the head, it is called head-marking.

Dependent-marking

Head-marking

Looking for correlations

Greenberg’s universals

  • If a language has inflection, it will also have derivation.
  • If a language has separate morphemes for number and case, and if both are either prefixes or suffixes, the number morpheme almost always occurs closer to the base than the case morpheme.
  • These are called implicational universals: the presence of one feature involves the presence of the other.

Looking for correlations

Bybee’s observations

  • In languages with a number of different inflectional affixes on verbs, those affixes tended to come in a particular order:
    • If a language has both tense and person/number affixes, the tense affix usually comes closer to the verb stem than the person/number affix.
    • If there are aspectual affixes, these tend to precede tense affixes.
  • Thus:
    • If a language uses suffixation for verb inflection, we get: 1: Stem, (2: Aspect), 3: Tense, 4: Person/number

Genetic and aereal tendencies

  • Languages seem to share certain morphological patterns when they are related:
    • Germanic languages prefer endocentric compounds: dish washer, Geschirrspüler
    • Romance languages prefer exocentric compounds: lavapiatti, lavaplatos
  • Some tendencies are more geographical: Balkan languages
    • Albanian (own branch) mik-u \(\rightarrow\) ‘friend-the’
    • Bulgarian (Balto-Slavic) trup-at \(\rightarrow\) ‘body-the’
    • Rumanian (Italic) om-ul \(\rightarrow\) ‘man-the’
  • Finally, a language may change its typology throughout time: consider the fusional, synthetic, inflectionally rich Old English and the closer-to-isolating Modern English

Summary

  • Typology explores the morphological patterns across languages and attempts to classify them
  • Regarding the relationship between morpheme and word, four big classifications have been proposed:
    • Analytic
    • Fusional
    • Agglutinative
    • Polysynthetic
  • One further classification is the head-vs-dependent marking
  • Some implicational universals have been proposed
  • Areal and family tendencies have also been found too

Next week

  • Attend the tutorial
  • Finish the exercises
  • Next lecture is ON CAMPUS!! :)