TYP105 - Structural Typology

languages can be classified in various ways syntactically on the basis of their word order and their relationships between heads and modifiers follow logically on the basis of several segmental and super segmental parameters the morphological classification which constitutes the focus of this Electra defines languages on the basis of the inflectional structure of their words how this is done and what types of languages can be identified using this structural parameter will be discussed in the following however first we have to solve one essential question why is it inflection and not any other morphological process on the basis of which languages can be classified morphologically well let's discuss this for a moment the following criteria which have primarily been based on present-day English have been put forward to distinguish inflection from word formation such as derivation the stability of what class is one criterion inflectional processes as you know from other electors of this channel do not change the word class of the stem irrespective of the type of morphological operation involved prefixing suffix in bowel change and so on and so forth the second criterion concerns the stability of stress pattern inflection at least in present-day English we know there are counter examples from other languages does not involve a change of the stress pattern of the stem the third criterion is referred to as semantic transparency inflection is semantically transparent that is the meaning that is created by a morphological operation is stable and then we have the criterion of productivity now a morphological process is fully productive if it applies to all members of a specific class hence inflectional processes are highly productive word formation processes by contrast are by and large not let's look at an example in present-day English for example all verbs can have the third-person singular or can denote the third-person singular but not all verbs can be nominal eyes nm L Z is the abbreviation so verbs like Reina or Sima etc are impossible and this sort of nominalization process is even different across languages thus it is the last criterion which makes it almost impossible to compare languages on the basis of their word formation principles all we could do is assess the word formation complexity over language on the whole but that's not normally used as a topological parameter so let us turn our attention to the inflectional classification of the world's languages now the inflectional possibilities of most languages can be defined in terms of a continuum which is illustrated by this vertical line here at one extreme of this continuum we find the so-called analytic or isolating languages whose words have little or no internal structure at the other extreme we find the synthetic languages which do allow the analysis of their words into smaller parts or morphs let us look at these two extremes in more detail now analytic languages which are also referred to as isolating generally do not allow the segmentation of their words that is the words of an analytic language cannot or hardly be split into smaller units thus a typical analytic language is a language where there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and morphemes well-known examples of analytic languages are Vietnamese or Chinese well let us look at these two languages in more detail here is a sentence in Vietnamese in fact it's the sentence most of you know from the VLC language index the man gives the woman the book and here is the Vietnamese equivalent let's listen first Quincy and as you can see quite clearly each more forward well there's hardly any difference between them corresponds to one translation or to one grammatical function so clearly a one-to-one relationship between words and morphemes well and here is the same sentence in Chinese let's listen again now Yankee new Yankee be sure and again we have syllables that stand for words that stand for morphemes you might want to argue that nan Ren and new Ren are compounds ok but we said earlier on word formation is not a criterion for the typological classification of the languages of the world so clearly Vietnamese and Chinese are analytic languages let's now look at the synthetic type of languages synthetic languages by contrast as I said earlier on do allow a segmentation of the words into morphs again I would like to illustrate this with two examples here is an example from Turkish Adam Lauren which means men's in the plural and clearly this word can be split into the following morphs Adam which is the stem and means man lar which stands for the plural and in which stands for the genitive so it's genitive plural and here is a sentence again the man gives the woman the book Adam cut the next above video and as you can see we can subdivide some words into morphs for example Kaduna where the R stands for the dative kita boo where Kitab is the stem and who is the accusative case marker and very or which can be subdivided into very stem and you're the present tense singular affix so Turkish is clearly a synthetic language and it can be placed down here on our continuum let's now look at another example my own mother tongue German the word mentioned can be subdivided into mensch plus its final suffix normally for in phonological e represented just by an alveolar nasal consonant mentioned well and here is the sentence their money get their father's boo and as you can see we can subdivide well at least one word into to morphs gives which we're get is the stem and the turf stands for the third-person singular present tense the remaining words incorporate the various morphological and grammatical functions but German clearly is synthetic too but what is the difference between these two languages let us now look at the function of the morphs in both cases in German and Turkish the affixes in Turkish we had other marine which can be subdivided into Adam Laurent in and as you can see we can clearly associate one particular function with the relevant moss in German this is relatively difficult now here we have the final suffix however this time the meaning is not so clear the final suffix can denote the plural in the nominative case plural genitive plural dative plural accusative and even the genitive singular so the difference between Turkish and German is that the bound mops in Turkish are functionally unambiguous whereas in German the bound morphs exhibit several grammatical functions thus depending on the function of the moths we can identify in a language we can define two types of synthetic language on the one hand we have the so called agglutinating synthetic languages such as Turkish where the morphs are by and large functionally unambiguous in such an agglutinative language some people call it a glutton ative a word may consist of more than one morph but the boundaries between the morphs are always clear-cut furthermore a given morph has mostly a reasonably invariant shape so that it's identification is in most cases straightforward another well-known example of a nun of an agglutinating language is Japanese it's also highly synthetic so let's place it over here the agglutinating languages can be contrasted with the fusional languages such as German here the dependent morphs often ask several grammatical functions associated with them in fusional languages some people refer to them as inflicting or inflective there are no clear-cut boundaries between the morphs also several grammatical functions several grammatical properties are often fused together to give a single unsegmented morph most indo-european languages are fusional for example Latin which is highly synthetic is fusional in many ways or Russian is also fusional perhaps less synthetic than Latin but more synthetic than German well what about present-day English well English has traditionally been defined as a synthetic fusion language - perhaps over here but as many of you know from the historical development of English English is becoming more and more analytic so perhaps it would be legitimate to place English up there because English has now many analytic words words that can cannot be subdivided any further words such as conjunctions prepositions pronouns etc note that it is often difficult to assign a language to the agglutinating of fusional type many synthetic languages have properties of both types a further but very special type of synthetic language is referred to as Polly synthetic now a polysynthetic or incorporating language is one in which the verb and the subject or object of a sentence may be included within a single word in other words the main functional elements of cloth structure are joined that is incorporated in one word and have no independent existence there are three types of polysynthetic languages for example the concatenative type which you can see over here an example would be Eskimo a lute where there is a heavy reliance on concatenation that is chaining of inflectional and derivational affixes in the formation of words well or sentences you might argue then we have the compositional type where content words especially where the stems are incorporated into more complex constructions examples can be found in the top one languages and finally we have the slot type a type of language that determines fixed positions for elements that can be obtained by members of the same paradigm so slots where certain elements belong slot type languages or slot type polysynthetic languages to be precise can be found among the North American and Australian indigenous languages in all polysynthetic languages the nature of words is extremely difficult to define so this is another argument for morphemes as linguistic units rather than words let's finally illustrate the degree of synthesis of a language as I said the distinction between analytic and synthetic is a continuum ranging from the most radically analytic or isolating type to the most highly synthetic perhaps polysynthetic type of language the position of a language on this continuum can be determined by calculating its degree of synthesis that is the number of morphemes per word in a random text sample of the language now the random takes sample which we have available in the language index of the virtual linguistics campus is of course the famous story the north wind and the Sun which has been recorded more than a thousand times for you to work with so let's take the first sentence and only the first clause to illustrate the calculation of the degree of synthesis now here is Chinese this is the first sentence the north wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger in Chinese let's listen first Yahweh beifong hye-young sign our children shade apace you come back and here is the same sentence in German so I can read it myself because I'm a native speaker of German eins triptans is not Windows Onan therefore in Biden washed alkaviva well you might want to stop the e lecture here and calculate the degree of synthesis by calculating the number of morphemes and divide them by the number of words so now it's up to you okay have you got the results well here they are the degree of synthesis in Chinese is clearly 1.0 the lowest figure you can get we have 19 words and each word can clearly be associated with a particular type of meaning and so we have a relationship of one to one between morphemes and words you might want to argue perhaps that since I is in fact to morph morphemes so but one word but that's a little bit critical and disputed in Chinese well in German in German we can clearly count 14 words but 20 morphemes you see for example that we have two morphemes in straighten where it is the stem which involves a vocalic change by the way of tighten and n is the a fix which fuses the third person and the singular into its structure or look at this one even then + dative plural in the ethics so clearly German is far more synthetic and the higher this value will be the more synthetic a language languages well here's my suggestion to you look at the language index on the virtual linguistics campus low the language low the story the North End and the Sun and calculate the degree of sentences synthesis of that language let's summarize the morphological or structural parameter of language classification is straightforward in examining the inflectional possibilities of a language we can classify languages as analytic versus synthetic and if a language is synthetic we can further examine the type of synthesis if the morphemes that make up the words of a language are functionally ambiguous the language is synthetic agglutinating if not it is a synthetic fusional language well and in specific cases where whole sentences are expressed via inflectional morphemes we have a special type the polysynthetic type of language however we should never forget that in all cases the structural parameter is not binary but continues

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Keywords: Linguistics, Language Typology, Language, analygtic, synthetic, Multimedia, Spectrograms, Praat, Linguistic Engineering, Jürgen Handke, Linguistics Online, VLC, Virtual Linguistics Campus, Inverted Classroom, Flipped Classroom, E-Lecture, University, College, Student, Education, Community, educational, mobile device, Marburg, University of Marburg, IWB055

Id: Ka5oH7gHOlw

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2012