The subject of linguistic typology, branches

T. is a brunch of linguistics which studies the structural similarities btw. languages regardless of their history.

T. studies: 1. what features do all lang. have in common? 2. In what ways do different lang. differ from each other? 3. how does the sound system of the native lang. differ from the sound system of the foreign lang? 4.How do grammatical categories differ? 5. how sentences and phrases are built in different lang.? 6. How are words built in different languages.

Comparative typology classifies languages according to their structure. Although languages may differ in their material (i.e. have no words of the same root, or common morphemes) their structure (i.e. relations between the elements, functions of the elements) may be similar.

e.g. The Russian and Bulgarian languages are kindred languages. Their material is similar. They have many words of the same root. However, structurally they are different. The Russian language has a system of six cases and the Bulgarian language has no category of case.

Another aim of comparative typology is to establish the most general characteristics common for several or all languages. Such characteristics are called language universale.

Branches of typology.

- phonological – studies sounds and their classification and types

- lexical – (words and their meaning)

- phraseology –

- morphological – (structure of a word , category, case, gender)

- general – (types of language, classification)

- special – (modern eng. – middle eng.)

1. Types of languages

Linguists try to find common features. This common features are called linguistic universals. (we may speak about: semantic, phonological, syntactic, grammatical universals.)

When the same universals are typical with the number of lang-s we speak about a type.

Structural classification contains 4 groups: 1. isolating, 2. flextional, 3. agglutinative, 4. incorporative.

But lang-s are never pure type. They usually combine elements of a variety of types but some features prevail. This classification was put forward by german linguist Humboldt. Friedrich Schlegel classified languages into two types: inflexional (having word endings) and non-inflexional (having affixes). His brother August Schlegel suggested distinguished 3 types: -languages without any grammatical structure (showing grammar relations by word order Chinese); - lang-s which use affixes; - with inflections.

Wilhelm Humboldt added one more group and gave all the types the names by which they are still known:
1. flexional languages. Grammar relations are shown in these languages by means of polysemantic morphemes.
e.g. The inflexion -ой belongs to an adjective of masculine gender, singular, in nominative case.
Roots can very rarely be used as a separate word ).
Indo-European and Semitic languages belong to inflexional languages.
2. Agglutinating languages. Grammar relations are shown by a series of monosemantic morphemes, "glued" to each other.
e.g. Turkish: Okul - okullar ) - okullarimiz - okkularimizda).
Roots can be used as independent words (c.f.
3. Isolating languages. They have no word changing morphemes. Grammar relations are shown by word order.
The Chinese language belongs to this group.
4. Polysynthetic languages. (incorporating) Words in the languages of this group are united so that a phrase or a sentence may consist of a single word. Such structure is found in the Chukchi language, some Indian languages.
Scholars used to think that the types of languages corresponded to stages of language development. So they thought that once every language was isolating by its structure and through the other stages is to become flexional sooner or later. Some looked upon this process as "perfecting" of the language, others thought it to be "degrading". Modern linguistics is against the idea of "better" or "worse" languages.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 2366