The document discusses morphological typology, categorizing languages based on their morpheme structures into analytic and synthetic types. Analytic languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, utilize isolated morphemes without affixation, while synthetic languages, including agglutinative, fusional, and polysynthetic languages, employ affixes to create more complex word forms. Examples provided illustrate the characteristics and complexities of these morphological types.

1. Morphological types of
languages
By: Ibrahim Muneer

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 andVietnamese 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.

5. 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.

6. 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’

7. 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

8. 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.

9. Thank you