Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year MORPHOLOGY ACROSS LANGUAGES Typological classification

by word formation: Comparing various languages according to structure is called language typology. Typology may involve any structural aspect of language: phonology, morphology or syntax. Let's look at how languages can be classified according to the number and complexity of morphemes used to build words. The basis for such classification was set in the first half of 19th century. In general, languages can be classified as: 1. isolating, meaning that words or word roots don't change based on how they are used in a sentence, and that the relationship of words to each other are conveyed primarily by the use of word order or by words known as "particles" to indicate the relationship among them; (e.g. Chinese, Indonesian, Krewol) 2. agglutinating or agglutinative, meaning that words are frequently formed by combining various combinations of "morphemes", wordlike units with distinct meanings. (e.g. Turkish, Finnish, Tamil) 3. inflectional or fusional, meaning that the forms of the words themselves change to indicate how they relate to the other words in a sentence; (e.g. Russian, Latin, Arabic) 4. polysinthetic, languages where the words tend to be extremely complex in morphological structure. But like every other universal statement about specific structures in language, there are exceptions to this tendency, as well. Lisu, a language spoken in Burma, is like Chinese and English in that it has no inflections to mark the relations subject and object, yet the language has free word order like Latin and Russian. The question arises as to how this language expresses its syntactic relations without ambiguity. Linguists are looking into it. Index of synthesis (IS) refers to the amount of affixation in a language, i.e., it shows the average number of morphemes per word in a language. It can be illustrated by means of a scale, as follows: Isolating <============> Polysynthetic The IS can be calculated by dividing the total number of morphemes by the total number of words within one large enough text sample of a language.

analytical

synthetical

Table Index of synthesis 1.ISOLATING LANGUAGES 1.1 Definition/Description Languages that are purely (or, relatively) isolating have a 1:1 (or, close to 1:1) morphemeword ratio. The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. For example, English is less inflectional, and thus more nearly analytic, than most Indo-European languages. 1

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically that is, via the use of grammatical i.e. unbound morphemes, which are separate words. An isolating language is a language in which almost every word consists of a single morpheme, most words consist only of a root. Languages that tend not to combine morphemes at all except to form compounds. They lack bound morphemes like affixes. 1.2 Distribution Isolating languages are especially common in Southeast Asia such as Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian, Tibeto-Burman, TaiKadai, HmongMien, and Mon Khmer, Cham, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Gbe languages. 1.3 Examples Example (Mandarin Chinese) I Since in isolating languages words are not subject to morphology, and in analytic languages they are not marked with morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry much importance. For example, Chinese makes use of word order to show subject object relationships. Mandarin Chinese is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:
mngtin tomorrow w I de (genitive particle(='s)) pngyou hu wi w zu friend will for y ge shngri dngo I make one (classifier) birthday cake

"Tomorrow my friends will make a birthday cake for me."

As can be seen, comparing the Chinese sentence to the English translation, while English is fairly isolating, it contains a synthetic feature, in the use of the bound morpheme -s (a suffix) to mark plurality. Note that "my" in the English translation is not composed of two morphemes, as may be wrongly supposed by comparing with the Chinese translation, but is a one-morpheme word that conveys the same meaning as two one-morpheme words in the Chinese translation. However, the definition of a "word" in Chinese does not exactly match its definition in English. Each morpheme in Chinese is one syllable. Any multi-syllable word can be analyzed as a compound word. Example (Mandarin) II W gile t y bn sh - 'I gave him a book'. I give he a book.

T gile w y bn sh. He gave me a book. He give I a book. (w) means 'I' (t) means 'him'. (W) and (T) simply change places in the sentence to indicate that their case has switched: there is no overt inflection in the form of the words. But English is also not totally analytic, because it does use inflections (for example, choose / chose / chosen / choosing); Mandarin Chinese has, e.g., "I go to store today.", "I go to store tomorrow.", "I go to store yesterday." Example (Chinese) - III 2

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year W kn t I see him. (*'I see he') T kn w He sees me. (*'He see I') T kn w p ng you He sees my friend. (*'He see I friend') T gi w chyn He gives me money. (*'He give I money') Source: (adapted from Midhat Rianovi, Jezik i njegova struktura, 1997.) This example illustrates another characteristic of isolating languages, words, mostly, do not belong to typical word categories, they jump from one category to the other without undergoing a change in the form. In 1st, 2nd and 4th sentence w is a personal pronoun corresponding to Bosnian forms 'ja', 'mene/me' and 'meni/mi' (English: 'I', 'me'-DO, and 'me'IO), while in the 3rd sentence the same w corresponds to something like possessive pronoun or adjective i.e. Bosnian form 'moj' (English: 'my'). Example (Vietnamese) - I ngi li drive person driver Source: http://www.trueknowledge.com It has no bound morphemes so that only morphology in the language is compounding. There is no morpheme corresponding to English er in driver, this concept being conveyed by a compound with roughly the structure drive+person. Example (Vietnamese) - II khi ti dn nh ban ti, chng ti bt du lm bi. when I come house friend I Plural I begin do lesson When I came to my friend's house, we began to do lessons. Source: Comrie 1989 43 2. AGGLUTINATING LANGUAGES 2.1 Definition/Description Languages that are agglutinating have a 1:x (x>1) morpheme-word ratio. Agglutinating languages use grammatical morphemes - affixes. An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 It is derived from the Latin verb agglutinare, which means "to glue together".In agglutinative languages each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Additionally, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others. Agglutinative languages tend to be very regular. For example, Japanese has only three irregular verbs, Turkish has only one and in the Quechua languages all the verbs are regular. Georgian is an exception; not only is it highly agglutinative but there are also a significant number of irregular verbs, varying in degrees of irregularity. A theoretically ideal agglutinative language would satisfy five criteria:

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year 1. there are no inflectional classes and all words of the same part of speech are inflected in the same way 2. there are several morphotactic positions for affixes of composite word forms, especially those of nouns and verbs 3. every morphological element (stem or affix) is clearly segmentable 4. the affixes convey one rather than several grammatical meanings 5. there are no morphophonological alternations in any element due to morphological processes such as affixation. Agglutination is the addition of a large number of affixes one after another: book-s, re-use, lik-able, anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism. There are agglutinating languages where prefixation predominates (Quileute); others prefer suffixation (Hungarian haz-ak-ban in the houses; Turkic languages: Kazakh it-ter-in of the dogs). However, morphemes in agglutinative languages can change. In Turkish there is one phonological process so-called vowel harmony - rules whereby most vowel sounds in a word are made either in the front of the mouth or the back, but not both e.g. Likewise, arabamz, 'our car,' but otobsmz, 'our bus'. The suffix is the same one, but modified according to vowel harmony. 2.2 Distribution In agglutinating languages words consist of a stem and one or more clearly identifiable affixes such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian (Uralic languages), Swahili, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Korean, the Northeast, Northwest and South Caucasian languages, the Bantu languages, Lakota, Inuktitut, the Igboid languages, the Japonic languages, Blackfoot, Basque (It is estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms), Austronesian languages, Algonquian languages, etc. Auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua have comparatively simple inflectional systems. 2.3 Examples Example (Turkish) I Turkish makes extensive use of suffixes e.g. terbiyesizliklerindenmis: good manners terbiye without good manners, rude rudeness their rudeness from their rudeness terbiyesiz terbiyesizlik terbiyesizlikleri terbiyesizliklerinden

I gather that it was from their rudeness terbiyesizliklerindenmis Note that a language doesn't necessarily need to be agglutinating to have long words. German, for example, has Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz, and English has Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!

Example (Turkish) - II

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year Sevilmedilermi Sev il me di ler mi Love passive not past plural question Werent they loved? (Zar nisu bili voljeni?) Source: adapted from Midhat Rianovi, Jezik i njegova struktura, 1997) Example (Turkish) III al work tr cause altrlmamalym l ma maly passive negation obligation m inference

apparently, (they say) he ought not to be made to work Source: adapted from Linguistics-an introduction, Radford et al) A main characteristic of agglutinative languages is that their words consist of a root morpheme (e.g. sev) and derivational and inflectional affixes. The root al work, comes at the beginning and the affixes each add their own component of meaning. In Turkish those affixes are suffixes and in Swahili those are prefixes. Example (Swahili) ni singular li na sema past 1.Pl to talk Ninasema I talk. (Govorim) Nilisema I talked. (Govorio sam) li na penda past 1.Pl to love Ninapenda I love. (Volim) Nilipenda I loved. (Volio sam)

ni singular

Source: adapted from Midhat Rianovi, Jezik i njegova struktura, 1997) Example (Estonian) 1. Ta on kohvikus. he is coffeehousein He is in the coffee house. 2. Lhme kohvikusse. gowe coffeehouseinto Let us go into the coffee house. 3. Ma tulen uuest kohvikust. I come newfrom coffeehousefrom I am coming out of the new coffee house. Source: adapted from Oinas, F., Basic Course in Estonian, Indiana University, 1966 Example (Navaho)

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year The morphology of the Navaho verb is striking in its lack of free root morphemes: all Navaho verb roots without exception are bound morphemes. For example, the Navaho morpheme that conveys the basic meaning of the English give is n. When speaking Navaho, one cannot say n anymore than an English-speaking person can say -ject- or -mit- and expect to be understood. Besides its basic, concrete meaning, each Navaho verb form conveys not only a basic idea such as give, take, have; it must also contain morphemes conveying tense, number of subjects, duration or repetition of action and even the shape of the object for those verbs that take direct objects. The imperative, or command for, is morphologically the most simple verb stem. We said that n means Give, but even in the meaning of a basic command to hand the speaker an object it can never be used as a separate word unless it is attached to a suffix that marks the shape of the object to be given: n give Aw' shaa nLteeh. TL'ooL shaa nl. T shaa nkaah. Tsin shaa nti,i,h. Beeldl shaa nLtss. Atsi' shaa n'aah. Give me the baby. (-Lteeh = living) Give me the rope. (-l = long flexible) Give me the water. (-kaah = liquid in a container) Give me the pole. (-ti,i,h= slender, rigid) Give me the blanket. (-Ltss = flat) Give me the meat. (-'aah = dense bulky object)

In Navaho only a very few root morphemes denoting basic concrete concepts can stand as separate words: shash bear, chizh firewood, olj moon. Thus, most noun roots denoting basic concepts are bound morphemes. Example (Hungarian) Siettek iskolaba hurried-they school-to They hurried to school. Source: http://catdir.loc.gov Example (Finnish) Talo Taloni Talossa Talossani Taloja Taloissa House My house In the house In my house Houses In the houses

Languages such as Turkish give the impression that every morpheme has just one meaning and every meaning in the language is assigned its own unique morpheme. This is often thought of as a kind of morphological ideal, conveying the idea that morphemes are glued together one by one. Agglutinative ideal

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year A perfect isolating or agglutinating language would have the property that every morpheme would have just one meaning and every meaning would correspond to just one morpheme. The difference between the agglutinating and isolating language is that in agglutinating language some of the morphemes would be bound, whereas in isolating they would all be free. In practice, there are deviations from such ideals and its unlikely that any language has ever met the ideal. Moreover, there are many languages which show agglutinating tendencies in some areas of grammar and isolating in others. For this reason, it is much more interesting to ask whether specific morphological processes are isolating, agglutinating or something else. 3. INFLECTIONAL LANGUAGES 3.1 Definition/Description An inflecting language is one whose primary means of building new words is by adding affixes, and adjacent morphemes tend to cause phonological changes in one another. A fusional language is a language in which one form of a morpheme can simultaneously encode several meanings. Fusional languages may have a large number of morphemes in each word, but morpheme boundaries are difficult to identify because the morphemes are fused together. Words consist of stem and affixes which often mark several grammatical categories simultaneously. Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be highly inflected, such as Latin, or weakly inflected, such as English. 3.2 Distribution Most European languages are somewhat fusional. All Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, English, German, Russian, Persian, Kurdish (kurd), Italian, Spanish, French, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bengali and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek, Old English, Old Norse, and Sanskrit are extensively inflected. The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian, have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation. The Baltic languages are also highly inflected. All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives. However, the overt case system has disappeared almost completely in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group. A high degree of fusion is also found in many Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami. Fusion is also found in Modern Standard Arabic. 3.3 Examples The first case is the nominative, roughly the subject of the sentence. In many languages, it is the basic form, sometimes represented by the bare stem. A second case is the vocative, which is the form used when calling out to someone. The rest of the cases are referred to as oblique or objective. A language in the Caucasus Mountains called Tassaran has 48 noun cases! Linguists point out that cases should only refer to inflectional languages such as Latin. Example (Latin vs. Turkish) I Forms of the Turkish noun EV 'house' singular Nominative ev Accusative evi Genitive evin Dative eve

plural evler evleri evlerin evlere 7

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year Ablative evden evlerden Forms of the Latin noun VILLA 'country house' singular plural Nominative vi:lla vi:llae Accusative vi:llam vi:lla:s Genitive vi:llae vi:lla:rum Dative vi:llae vi:lli:s Ablative vi:lla: vi:lli:s The first thing we notice about the Turkish forms is that there is a single set of case endings which are used for both singular and plural: -i, -in, -e, -den. The exponent of the plural for all case forms is the suffix ler. However, the picture of Latin forms is much less clear. There's no single suffix which expresses the property 'plural'. The case endings for the singular and plural don't correspond to each other at all. the nominative plural form is identical to the genitive and dative singular forms. The problem is that each Latin noun is only able to take a single suffix. Therefore, each suffix has to be simultaneously the exponent of two properties, number and case. The phenomenon where a single affix expresses more than one property within a word is called cumulation. Example (Latin vs. Turkish) II Forms of the Turkish noun KEDI 'cat' singular plural Nominative kedi kediler Accusative kediyi kedileri Genitive kedinin kedilerin Dative kediye kedilere Ablative kediden kedilerin Forms of the Latin noun FELES 'cat' singular plural Nominative fe:les fe:le:s Accusative fe:lem fe:li:s Genitive fe:lis fe:lium Dative fe:li: fe:libus Ablative fe:le fe:libus It turns out that there is a very large number of words which take the same endings as VILLA and quite a few which take the same endings as FELES, so this is not just a case of isolated regularity. There are other patterns of endings for other groups of nouns (5 classes). Distinct groups of words with different inflections to express the same sets of properties are called inflectional classes (traditional term for inflectional classes of N and Adj is declension). The facts of Turkish indicate that it lacks declensions. Example (Latin) - I Bonus (good) -us masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number Bonum -um masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular or neuter nominative singular. Example (Latin) - II

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year Custodes fideles consules veteres ducunt. NomPl/AccPl NomPl/AccPl NomPl/AccPl NomPl/AccPl 3Pl The trusty guards are leading the old consuls. The old guards are leading the trusty consuls. The trusty consuls are leading the old guards. The old consuls are leading the trusty guards. Terms: NomSg=nominative singular, NomPl=nominative plural, AccSg=accusative singular, AccPl=accusative plural, 3Sg=third person singular, 3Pl=third person plural Source:http://chars.lin.oakland.edu/General/TypologicalClassification.pdf Example (Spanish vs. English) III Example (Spanish) - I the - in habl 'to speak' simultaneously codes indicative mode, third person, singular, past tense, and perfective aspect. Source: Payne, T. 1997a 28 Example (Spanish) II

Image: Inflection of the Portugese or Spanish lexeme for ''cat''. Blue represents the feminine gender, grey represents the form used for mixedgender, and green represents the plural number; the singular is unmarked.

Spanish is generally viewed as an inflectional language, although all three typologies exist to some extent. English is more isolating than Spanish, although English too has inflectional aspects. As an example of the isolating aspect of Spanish, most nouns are inflected only to indicate whether they are plural or singular. In Spanish, word order and prepositions are typically used to indicate the function of a noun in a sentence. In a sentence such as "Pedro ama a Adriana" (Pedro loves Adriana), the preposition a is used to indicate which person is the subject and which is the object. (In the English sentence, word order is used to indicate who loves whom.) An example of an agglutinative aspect of Spanish (and of English) can be seen in its use of various prefixes and suffixes. For example, the difference between hacer (to do) and deshacer(to undo) is in its use of the morpheme (a unit of meaning) des-. Words that are never subjected to inflection are said to be invariant; for example, "must" is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its category can only be determined by its context.

Example (Bosnian)

Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year Typologically Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is an inflectional language. Words have different forms (inflections) marked mostly with suffixes. Ne-pri-hvat-ljiv-ost Unacceptability Source: adapted from Midhat Rianovi, Jezik i njegova struktura, 1997) 4. POLYSINTHETIC LANGUAGES 4.1 Definition/Description Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many American Indian languages) are called polysynthetic languages. In many polysynthetic languages a word may contain bound morphemes corresponding to both verb and noun in English. This means that what are subject and predicate in an English sentence will often be expressed by a single word in a polysynthetic language. 4.2 Distribution Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, Algonquian languages, EskimoAleut languages, Iroquoian languages, Nadene languages, Totonacan languages, Uto-Aztecan languages, Mayan languages, Quechuan languages, Munda languages, many Papuan languages, etc. 4.2 Examples Example (Nootka) inikw-ihl'-minih-'is-it-a (verb)

inikw-ihl'-minih-'isit-i (noun)

fire-in house-plural-small-past ongoing fire-in house-plural-small-past ongoingSeveral small fires were burning in the house. The several small fires burning in the house Example (Oneida) Gnaglaslizaks g nagla sl i zak s *I reside noun for watch now. *Ja obitavati imenica za gledati sad. Im looking for a village. Ja traim jedno selo. g I 1.Sg., nagla to reside, to live, sl affix for forming nouns (naglasl becomes village), i derivational affix which ascribes the verbal morpheme zak to watch the meaning of to look for/to search, and s a grammatical morpheme which indicates the duration of the action. Source: adapted from Midhat Rianovi, Jezik i njegova struktura, 1997)

CONCLUSION

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Morphology and phonology in generative grammar (presentation) Nizami Majda 4th year Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages, while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin) are called inflectional. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese that never use inflections are called analytic or isolating. All languages are really mixed systems. English, for example, uses all three methods: To make the future tense of a verb, we use the particle will (I will see you); to make the past tense, we usually use the affix -ed (I changed it); but in many words, we change the word for the past (I see it becomes I saw it). Looking at nouns, sometimes we make the plural with a particle (three head of cattle), sometimes with an affix (three cats), and sometimes by changing the word (three men). But, because we still use a lot of non-syllable affixes English is still considered an inflectional language by most linguists. REFERENCES: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ http://chars.lin.oakland.edu/General/TypologicalClassification.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language http://www.scribd.com/doc/13160398/Karlsson-Finnish-as-an-Agglutinating-Language http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/typology.htm http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/morphology.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language http://spanish.about.com/od/historyofspanish/a/linguist.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language http://ripper.dasie.mimuw.edu.pl/~accek/homepage/wp-content/papercitedata/pdf/ace10.pdf http://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php? PHPSESSID=b327e8003f904395f800f8a823e25710&topic=156915.0#ixzz1h6XGscDo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection http://www.info.uta.fi/kurssit/clir/sisalto/clir8_language_typologies.htm http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/details/LanguageGuide/VowelHarmony.html Midhat Rianovi - Jezik i njegova struktura (p. 176-181) Andrew Radford et al - Linguistics An introduction (p. 156-158)

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