LING2009 Languages of the World 3:
Morphological types
Analytic vs. synthetic futures in French
il va pleuvoir il pleuv-ra
it go rain it rain-FUT
'It's going to rain' 'It will rain'
Continuum: Analytic <--------------------------> Synthetic
Typology: Isolating ----- Agglutinating ----- Polysynthetic
|
Fusional
1. Isolating morphology: common in Southeast Asian languages
1.1 Cantonese: largely an isolating language
each morpheme behaves as an independent word - even grammatical morphemes
-
lek gwo ngo, lek dak gwo ngo 'smarter than me'
gwo: a morpheme with a grammatical meaning (comparison: "more than") but not a suffix like -er
few prefixes or suffixes
gong-gan syu '(s/he is) lecturing'
-gan: a suffix indicating progressive aspect
1.2 Thai: independent words expressing grammatical categories
Progressive aspect: Khaw kamlang rian phasaa thaai yuu
S/he PROG study language Thai at
“She’s studying the Thai language.”
Nominalization: Kaan rian phasaa thaai sanuk maak
NOM study language Thai fun much
“Studying Thai is fun”
Plural: phuak khaw
PL s/he
"they"
Serial verbs -- a series of verbs in the same clause, common in isolating languages
khaw kham saphaan long pay
s/he cross bridge descend go
'He went down across the bridge'
2. Agglutinating morphology: typical of many Uralic, Altaic languages
- words can be segmented into morphemes
- grammatical categories represented by affixes (= prefixes, suffixes or infixes)
Hungarian nouns: each morpheme represents a single category
| Case | Singular | Plural |
| Nominative (subject) | ember 'man' | ember-ek `men' |
| Accusative (object) | ember-t | ember-ek-et |
| Dative (indirect object) | ember-nek 'to a man' | ember-ek-nek 'to men' |
Vowel Harmony: each word contains only front vowels (e/i) or only back vowels (a/o/u). Hence vowel alternations in suffixes:
| Back vowels | Front vowels | |
| Plural | asztal-ok "tables" | gyerek-ek "tables" |
| Dative case | István-nak "to Steven" | Peter-nek "to Peter" |
| Inessive case | a ház-ban "in the house" | a szem-ben "in the eye" |
| Illative case | a ház-ba "into the house" | a szív-be "into the heart" |
| 1st person possessive | a ház-om "my house" | a szív-em "my heart" |
Fusion: two morphemes "fuse" such that they can no longer be separated. Occasional cases even in Hungarian
| a barát-om "my friend" | a barát-ok "the friends" | a barát-aim "my friends" (not a barát-ok-om) |
| a kert-em "my garden" | a kert-ek "the gardens" | a kert-jeim "my gardens" (not a kert-ek-em) |
3. Fusional morphology: typical of older and more conservative Indo-European languages
- prefixes and suffixes 'fuse' with word stems
- words cannot be segmented into morphemes
Latin Nouns: each inflection (ending) represents several categories; endings “fuse” with stem.
| Case | Singular | Plural |
| Nominative (subject) | puella `girl' | puellae `girls' |
| Accusative (object) | puellam | puellas |
| Dative (indirect object: "to") | puellae | puellis |
| Genitive (possessor) | puellae | puellaarum |
| Ablative (“by/with/from”) | puellaa | puellis |
- 'portmanteau' morphemes represent several categories at once, e.g. -as in puellas indicates both accusative case and plurality, but cannot be segmented into a case and a plural component
- syncretism: the same inflection marks a number of logically different forms e.g. puellae could be nominative plural, dative or genitive singular
Russian Nouns:
| Case | Singular | Plural |
| Nominative (subject) | vodá 'water' | vódy 'waters' |
| Accusative (object) | vódu | vódy |
| Dative (indirect object: "to") | vodé | vodám |
| Genitive (possessor) | vodý | vód |
| Instrumental ("with/using") | vodój | vodámi |
- portmanteau morphemes: vodám indicating both dative case and plurality
- syncretism: Nominative and Accusative plural share the same form, vódy
- stress shifts from first (vódy) to second syllable (vodá) acording to the form
4. Polysynthetic morphology: Palaeosiberian languages such as Ainu, Chukchi; Eskimo languages such as Yupik (see Lyovin, p. 35-64)
- morphemes accumulate so that a word represent a whole sentence
- nouns may be incorporated into verbs
Ainu: language isolate, fomerly spoken on Hokkaido and neighbouring islands
No longer spoken as native language; some revival of Ainu culture and language
Agglutination: possessive prefixes
| mici "father" | ku-mici "my father" |
| sapo "elder sister" | ku-sapo "my elder sister" |
| po "son" | ku-po(ho) "my son" |
| hoku "husband " | ku-hoku(hu) "my husband" |
Examples from Classical Ainu (Shibatani 1988)
(1) Wakka-ku-rusuy-an. (Word as sentence)
water-drink-want-1sg
“I want to drink water.”
(2) Wakka a - ta - re => (3) A - wakka - ta - re (Noun Incorporation)
water 1sg-draw-CAUS 1sg-water-draw-CAUS
“I had him draw water.” “I had him draw water (from a well).”
Ainu house on Hokkaido (from The Ainu Musuem)
5. Introflection in Semitic languages: a fifth morphological type?
Root SLM 'peace': shalom (Hebrew name/greeting)
selamat (Malay greeting, borrowed from Arabic)
Islam (religion: state of peace)
Tri-consonantal roots with grammatical information provided by (a) vowels, (b) prefixes (Lyovin, p. 210-11)
| Root KTB 'write' | Active | Passive |
| Perfective | kataba 'wrote' | kutiba 'was written' |
| Imperfective | ja-ktubu 'is writing' | ju-ktabu 'is being written' |
Finnish has many interesting word forms. On the basis of the text below compare the word forms of nouns in this language with the previously considered word forms of nous in English and Polish
Both Uralian and Indo-European protolanguages had a relatively rich system of word flexion, e.g. about six cases for nouns. Typically Indo-European languages have developed towards a more analytic system where grammatical relations are expressed by word order, prepositions, and other auxiliary words rather than word flexion. On the other hand, in Uralian languages flexion has typically been preserved, and in part it has even expanded. Thus, for example, contemporary English has essentially just two cases (nominative and genitive), whereas Finnish has more than a dozen cases. Finnish has also a rich set of verb forms.
Thus, Finnish is a synthetic language: it uses suffixes to express grammatical relations and also to derive new words. To take a simple example, the single Finnish word talossanikin corresponds to the English phrase in my house, too. The suffix -ssa is the ending of the so-called inessive case, roughly corresponding to the English preposition in. The suffix -ni is a possessive one, corresponding to my in English. And the suffix -kin is an enclitic particle corresponding to the English word too (and the Latin enclitic -que). An example of verb flexion is kirjoitettuasi, which requires an entire sentence when translated into English: after you had written.
There are, however, some tendencies from synthetic to analytic expression in contemporary spoken Finnish. Thus, in free speech most Finns would rather say e.g. mun talossa (with mun corresponding to English my) than talossani, and verb forms like kirjoitettuasi usually only appear in written language – spoken language uses an analytic expression roughly corresponding to the English one.
Flexion uses suffixes only in Finnish. Originally the system was simply agglutinative: suffixes were “glued” to words by simple concatenation. (Compare this with e.g. the old Indo-European system of vowel alteration, which still lives in irregular verb flexion like in English sing : sang : sung.) However, due to various phonetic changes, in Finnish suffixes very often cause changes in the word root, causing phenomena which resemble flexion (e.g. juon ‘I drink’, join ‘I drank’), and for several suffixes there are alternative forms. Typical changes in the base word include:
