Morphological Typology

LNGS2624: GRAMMAR OF THE WORLDS LANGUAGES

DR GWENDOLYN HYSLOP
WEEK 1, LECTURE 2
09/03/2016
Outline

Morphosyntactic analysis: a refresher

Kurtp
versus Mandarin
Some useful terminology: ways of doing grammar
Lexical
Morphological
Periphrastic (syntactic)
Morphological typology
 Kurtp (Tibeto-Burman: Bhutan)

Would you say that Kurtp has verbs?

If so, what defines, or characterizes a verb?
What morphological properties characterize a verb?
Would you say that Kurtp has nouns or pronouns?
If so, how are they different from verbs?
What part of speech is mik?
Compare: Mandarin Chinese

w ch le I ate
Based on these data, does Mandarin Chinese have a
w hu ch I will eat class of verbs, different from a class of nouns? What
characterizes each?
w yo ch I want to eat
Verbs can appear before particles like le or after
auxiliaries like hu.
w de sh my book
Nouns cannot occur before le or after hu.
w de mo my cat Nouns can be possessed using the particle de.

*w sh le
*w hu sh
The extent of morphology

Morphology is not equally prominent in all languages

Languages vary considerably in how much use they make of bound
morphemes
What one language expresses by a bound morpheme, another
language might express by a separate word

English: boy vs. boy-s Udeghe: ba:ta vs. ba:ta ziga

English: I vs. we Mandarin: w vs. w men
How languages do grammar

Lexical: with a unique lexical item

e.g. English: I eat breakfast versus I feed the baby breakfast (feed being a unique
lexical item)
Morphological: with morphology
e.g. Hindi: mujhse kaam karna hai I have to work versus adhyaapakne mujhse
kaam karvaaya The teacher made me work (the causative affix vaaya being used
with the verb)
Periphrastic/Analytic: with syntax
e.g. English questions I am working versus What am I doing? (note the inverted
word order in addition to use of the wh- word)
Morphological typology

The classification of languages began at least as early as 1808 with

August von Schlegel, who noted affixal versus inflectional languages.
This quickly turned into a three-way division of languages into isolating
(e.g. Chinese), agglutinative (e.g. Turkish) and fusional (e.g. Latin and
Greek)
Fusional languages, like Latin and Greek (high number of meanings per
morpheme), were viewed as the culmination of human linguistic
endeavour (!!)
-o in LAT am-o I love = 1st person singular present indicative active
Morphological typology

Edward Sapirs criticism in his book Language (1921: 124):

A linguist that insists upon talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it
were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoologist
that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey
cow

Sapir tried to revive the typology without notable success mainly due to
impenetrable terminology
Today: Synthesis and Fusion

Synthesis: Number of morphemes per word

Fusion: Meanings/functions per morpheme
Analytic and synthetic means of expression

Languages can be classified based on how many morphemes they have per word)
Languages are sometimes referred to as analytic or synthetic depending on
the degree to which morphology is made use of in a language
The distribution between analytic and synthetic languages is not a bipartition
but a continuum!
We talk about the degree of synthesis a language exhibits:

analytic synthetic
(isolating) (polysynthetic)
Analytic languages

In analytic languages like English, morphology plays a relatively minor

role
Highly analytic languages (sometimes also called isolating) have almost
no morphology, such as Yoruba (Nigeria) and Vietnamese and many
other languages of South East Asia

Yoruba (Rowlands 1969:93)

Nwn maa gb nn w lss
they FUT PROG get pound ten weekly
They will be getting 10 a week.
Synthetic languages

In synthetic languages morphology plays a more important role e.g. in

Swahili (Kenya, Tanzania), Sanskrit, or many others

Lezgian (Haspelmath 1993:140)

Marf-adi wii-n qalin stal-ra-ldi qaw gata-
zwa-j
rain-ERG self-GEN dense drop-PL-INSTR roof hit-IMPF-
PAST
The rain was hitting the rook with its dense drops.
Polysynthetic languages

Highly synthetic languages - sometimes also called polysynthetic

languages - include many languages from North America and
Greenlandic Eskimo

Greenlandic (Fortescue 1984:36)

paasi-nngil-luinnar-para ilaa-juma-sutit
understand-not-completely-1SG.SUBJ.3SG.OBJ.INDIC come-want-2SG.PART
I didnt understand at all that you wanted to come along.
The degree of synthesis in some languages

Language Ratio of morphemes

per word
We can determine the position of a
Greenlandic Eskimo 3.72 language on the continuum by
computing its degree of synthesis,
Sanskrit 2.59 i.e. the ratio of morphemes per
Swahili 2.55 word in a random text sample of
Old English 2.12 the language
Lezgian 1.93
German 1.92
Modern English 1.68
Vietnamese 1.06
Degree of synthesis

Holistic morphological typologies dont tell the whole story about a

language
To understand more about language we should really talk about the
degree of synthesis in specific constructions
In English the plural formation is synthetic. But passive is formed
analytically/periphrastically

(9) a. John kissed Mary

b. Mary was kissed by John
 Agglutinating and fusional means of expression
16

Refers to the degree to which distinct (bound) morphemes have distinct

grammatical functions
Also better conceived as a cline:

Agglutinating fusional
(1 morpheme:1 function) (1:many)
Agglutinating
17

E.g. Turkish
adam man
SG PL
NOM adam adam-lar
ACC adam- adam-lar-
GEN adam-n adam-lar-n
DAT adam-a adam-lar-a
ABL adam-dan adam-lar-dan

Bound morphemes are distinct, every morpheme has a distinct grammatical

function
Fusional
18

Spanish Present
tense
habl- speak 1 habl-o
Number, Person, and Tense
SG 2 habla-s
expressed in a single morpheme
3 habla(-)

1 habla-mos

PL 2 habl-is

3 habla-n
Summary

Languages differ in terms of the prominence of morphology in the

grammar. Constructions in languages can be classified along a
continuum between analytic and synthetic based on this prominence
The dimension of fusion (agglutinating vs. fusional) refers to the
ratio of the number of functions per grammatical morpheme