Talk:Morphological typology
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It would be nice to see where English is classified in the article, as anyone who is generally unfamiliar with linguistics (as I am) would then have some kind of basis for comparison.
- Somewhere between synthetic and analytic, I'd guess, as most modern IE languages(?)... I believe these example languages are chosen for their "purity" of being of a certain type. As an example of how english has different typology for different grammatical functions: "The dog ate the fish" Vs "The fish ate the dog" is purely analytic, whereas strong verb conjugations such as sing,sang,sung is truly synthetic. I believe old english was much more synthetic than modern english, but, like many other IE languages, it evolved into a more analytic language throughout the ages.
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- Hmmm, maybe the strong verbs are more "fusional" than "synthetic", I must have missed that when I wrote this answer, earlier...
- As languages go, English is quite analytic, more so than other Indo-European languages. Inflectional morphology is v. limited, confined to plurals (dog:dogs), the enclitic possessive (dog:dog's), the third person present inflection (John walk-s), the past tense (John walk-ed), the participial and gerunds (walk-ing, walk-ed), the strong verbs (ex, sing, sings, singing, sang, sung), pronouns, and various irregular words. Our derivational morphology, though, is rather complex (and agglutinative rather than fusional) than Anglo-Saxon's, thanks to the influx of words and affixes from the classical languages (ex, anti-, mini-, -ment, ize, all of which are Greco-latin in origin). Most other Indo-European languages are more synthetic, witness German declensions and Spanish conjugations. Spoken French tends towards polysynthesism, even (a recent inovation): Jean, il l'y a acheté la voiture, where il l'y acheté is pronounced as one word (lit. John, he it-there had bought the car, John bought the car there.) In fact, Mandarin Chinese can be analyzed as being more synthetic than English, though both the Hanzi and pinyin obscure it. A majority of words are bisyllabic (pengyou, zuotian, etc) and there's many bound morphemes (all measure words, for example). Since Chinese is so different from Western languages, no plural markings or conjugations, westerners tend to think it's incredibly isolating. English is considered more synthetic than it is because it's Indo-European, a language family tending strongly towards synthesysm. Of course, both Chinese and English are more isolating than synthetic. Generally speaking, an isolating language is one that marks all grammatical relationships purely by syntax, with no morphology at all, whereas a totally synthetic language would mark everything through morphology. Neither extreme exists, of course; it's a continuum. Thai is one extreme, Inuit the other. The terms fusional and agglutinative refer to types of synthesism. A fusional language marks many things in one morpheme. The -a in Rus. doma marks the word as being feminine, singular and genitive (IIRC), whereas an agglutinative language (Turkish, Quechua) would mark each thing separately.
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- Correction: -a in Russian doma either marks it as masculine, plural, nominative noun (domá) or as masculine, singular, genitive none (dóma). "Dóma" could also be an adverb meaning "at home".
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[edit] Any other fusional groups?
It seems to me that only Indo-European languages are fusional. Most others seem to be agglutinating or isolating. Are there any other families with fusional tendencies?
[edit] Suprasegmental features
- 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.
I have trouble understanding this bit. I thought suprasegmentals were not lexically distinctive, and hence separable from all segments or groups of segments. --Kjoonlee 03:32, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
