3. 1. MORPHOLOGY AND
MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY
Morphology- the study of word formation and
structure.
Morphological typology- a system for classifying the
world's languages based on how their morphemes
are used.
Morphological typology is a way of classifying
the languages of the world that groups languages
according to their
common morphological structures.
4. 2. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES OF
LANGUAGES
Linguists can categorize languages based on their
word-building properties and usage of different
affixation processes.
The broadest distinction among languages is
whether or not affixation is allowed at all, or if every
word must be a single morpheme.
Two main morphological types: analytic
languages and synthetic languages.
5. 3. ANALYTIC LANGUAGES
Analytic Languages
These are also known as isolating languages because they're
composed of isolated, or free, morphemes. Free morphemes can
be words on their own, such as cat or happy. Languages that are
purely analytic in structure don't use any prefixes or suffixes,
ever. However, it's rare to find a language that is purely analytic
or synthetic since most languages have characteristics of both.
Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese are good examples of
analytic languages. Note that properties such as “plural” and
“past” comprise their own morphemes and their own words.
The logographic writing systems of many languages used in Asia
undoubtedly contribute to their analytic nature, since each
symbol they write represents an entire word. English, on the
other hand, is one of the most analytic Indo-European
languages, but is still usually classified as a synthetic language.
6. 4. SYNTHETIC LANGUAGES
Synthetic languages differ from analytic languages
because they do use affixes, also known as bound
morphemes. Synthetic languages include three
subcategories: agglutinative, fusional, and
polysynthetic.
7. AGLUTINATING LANGUAGSES
Agglutinative languages have words which may
consist of more than one, and possibly many,
morphemes.With these languages, morphemes
within words are usually clearly recognizable in a
way that makes it easy to tell where the morpheme
boundaries are. Their affixes usually only have a
single meaning. Turkish, Korean,
Hungarian, Japanese, and Finnish are all in this
group.(aglutinative languages)
• el-ler-imiz-in (Turkish)
• hand-plr.-1 st plr.-genitive case, ‘of our hands’
8. FUSIONAL LANGUAGES
Fusional languages, like other synthetic languages, may have
more than one morpheme per word. The are similar to
agglutinating languages, except that the morpheme
boundaries are much more difficult to discern. Affixes are
often fused with the stems, and can have multiple meanings.
Fusional languages may have morphemes that combine
multiple pieces of grammatical information
A prime example of a fusional language is Spanish, especially
when it comes to verbs. In the word hablo "I speak", the -
o morpheme tells us that we're dealing with a subject that is
singular, first person, and in the present tense. It's difficult to
find a morpheme that means "speak", however, since habl- is
not a morpheme. Fusional languages can be tricky!
• [ˈabl-o] ‘I am speaking’ -[o] suffix means 1 st person sng.,
present tense
9. POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES.
Polysynthetic Languages: These languages are
undoubtedly some of the most difficult to learn.
• Polysynthetic languages often display a high degree
of affixation (high number of morphemes per word)
and fusion of morphemes.
They often have verbs that can express the entirety
of a typical sentence in English, which they do by
incorporating nouns into verbs forms. For example,
the Sora language of India has one word that
means "I will catch a tiger". Many Native American
languages are polysynthetic.
10. 5. CONCLUSION
So we’ve looked at canonical examples of four
types of languages: analytical, agglutinative,
fusional, and polysynthetic. • But languages often
show elements of different morphological types. • If
a language is hard to classify as one of the four
main types, it may be considered “mixed.” The
properties that distinguish these types may in fact
be gradient rather than categorical.
