Morphological Types of Languages

Morphological classification is based on similar and different structures of languages independently of their genealogy. The first morphological classification of world languages was undertaken by German linguists and brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel and then developed by Wielgelm Gumboldt. The last classification is valid now. According to it all languages can be divided into 4 groups: isolative (root) languages; agglutinating languages; incorporating languages; flexional languages.

Isolative (root) languages have no affixes and express their grammatical meanings by means of adjoining (способом прилягання) of one word to another with the help of functional words. There is no difference b/w root and word in these languages. Hence the other name root languages. Words do not conjugate (відмінюватися), that's why they have no indices of their syntactical links with other words in a sentence. A word seems isolated, hence the other term - isolated. The classical examples of such type are ancient Chinese and Vietnamese languages. Here also belong Tibetian, Malay and Burmese languages. To show the links between words they usually use word order, Junctional words, tones, reduplication (doubling).

Agglutinating (Lat. gluten - E. "glue" - клей, agglutino - "to stick") are languages in which grammatical meanings are expressed by particular affixes-labels. Such affixes show time, person, number, mood, case etc.
Each affix has only one meaning. Affixes are ordered according to the principle: from affixes with wider meaning towards the affixes with narrower meaning. All Turkish and Finno-Ugrian (yrpo- фінські) languages belong to this group, as well as Eskimo, Georgian, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. E.g. in Turkish -lar - pi. form, -da - locative (місцевий відмінок): masa (стіл), masada на столі), masalar (столи), masalarda (на столах).

Incorporating (polysynthetic) (Lat. incorporation - "include"; Gr. polys - "many"+synthesis - "unification") are languages in which different parts of utterance are united in complexes by means of functional words, so, sentences look like compound words. Here belong Chuckchee and many Indian languages of North America. Thus, in the Chuckchee language there is a conffix га - ма inside of which they input necessary nouns, adj., pronouns, e.g.: zanojz ма (зі списом); гаторпо/гма (з новим списом).

Flexional are languages in which grammatical meaning is expressed by flexions. Here belong the Indo-European and Semitik- Hamitik (семіто-хамітські) languages. In these languages suffixes and endings have many meanings. E.g. стол-а ending -a expresses 3 meanings: gender, number and case. Flexional languages are subdivided into synthetic and analytic.

-Synthetic (Gr. synthesis - "unification") are languages in which grammatical meaning is expressed by means of affixes, gradation (чергування звуків), suppletivism (forms of one and the same word are formed from different roots, e.g.: я - мене, добре - краще, говорити - сказати; be - am - is - are - was). Here belong Eastern Slavonic languages, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, German, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic etc.

-Analytic (Gr. analysis - "division") are languages in which lexical meaning is expressed by notional words and grammatical meaning - by functional words, word order, and intonation. E.g.: J'ai arrive, 1 have arrived. This group comprise all Romanic languages, English. Dutch, Tadzhik, Hindu, Bulgarian, and Macedonian.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 2766