ESSENTIALS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

BRANCHES OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

Comparative Linguistics

phonetical

lexical

morpholog ical, and syntactic

ASPECTS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

synchronical

diachronical

PRACTICAL AIMS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

1) translation practice; 2) compiling dictionaries; 3) teaching foreign languages.

METHODS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

SPECIFIC METHODS: OTHER METHODS: 1) descriptive; 2) experimental; 3) statistic; 4) transformational; 5) substitutional; 6) intermediate and ultimate constituents analysis; 7) inductive (comparing language data on the ground of certain criteria); 8) deductive (working out criteria for comparison) methodology.

1)

2)

contrastive; historical and comparative.

TERMINOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

Language Universals Language Type Typological dominant features Typological recessive features Isomorphic (common) and allomorphic (divergent) features Metalanguage An Etalon Language A World Language Artificial Languages Language Norm Speech Norm

History of Comparative Linguistics

the end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 19th century, which is called the beginning of comparative research; the end of the 19th century the period of neogrammarian studies, when linguists started comparing living languages; the beginning of the 20th century up to the present the period of structural and functional approaches to language.

W. von Humboldts Classification of Languages

isolating (like Chinese); agglutinative (like Turkish); flexional (like Russian, Ukrainian); incorporating (languages of American

Indians).

LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATIONS

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS
(estimated statistics in the early 1980-s)

Indo-European Sino-Tibetan Niger-Congo Afro-Asiatic Ausronesian Dravidian Japanese Altaic Austro-Asiatic Korean Tai Nilo-Saharan Amerindian Uralic

2,000,000,000 1,040,000,000 260,000,000 230,000,000 200,000,000 140,000,000 120,000,000 90,000,000 60,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 30,000,000 25,000,000 23,000,000

THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY

The Indo-Iranian Group The Baltic Group The Slavic Group The Hellenic group The Romance Group The Germanic Group The Celtic Group The Albanian Language The Armenian Language

THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES

GROUPS

Western
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and Kashubian

Southern
Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene

Eastern
Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian

THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES

GROUPS

Western
English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and Frisian

Northern
Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese

Eastern
Gothic (dead)

TABLE OF TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES

(according to V. Skalichka)

TYPES OF LANGUAGES (morphological classification)

agglutinative ; inflecting (fusion); isolating ; polysynthetic; introflexional (Arabic, Hebrew).

Agglutinative Languages
Words are built up out of a long sequence of units, with each unit expressing a particular grammatical meaning, in a clear one-to-one way, e.g., one for each category of person, number, tense, voice, and mood. Affixes may be glued to the stem of word to add to its meaning or to show its grammatical function, e.g., in Swahili wametulipa they have paid us consists of wa + me + tu +lipa they perfective us pay marker Languages which are highly agglutinative include Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swahili, and Turkish, although there is no clear-cut distinction between agglutinative, inflecting, and isolating languages.

Inflecting (fusion) Languages

The form of a word is changed to show a shift in meaning or grammatical function. Often there is no clear distinction between the basic part of the word and the part which shows a grammatical function such as number or tense. For e.g.: mice (= mouse + plural); came (= come + past tense). Greek, Latin, English, Russian, and Ukrainian are inflecting languages, though English is analytical, whereas other languages mentioned are synthetical (with more inflections and fewer auxiliaries).

ANALYTICAL & SYNTHETICAL LANGUAGES

SYNTHETICAL LANGUAGES Grammatical meaning is synthesized with the lexical one within the word form. Grammatical meaning is realized by means of inflections and word-forming affixes, sound interchange (ablaut), and suppletivity.
ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES Lexical meaning is realized by notional words, while grammatical by auxiliaries, word order, and intonation. Analytization is extremely intensive and is manifested in the functional synonymy of caseinflections, reduction of the nounparadigm, word-order fixation, predominance of adjoinment in wordphrase relations, abundance of paradigmatic forms (Continuous, Perfect, Perfect Continuous), predominance of conversion, postposition formation and phrasing among word-building patterns, abundance of function-words.

Isolating Languages
They lack inflexions. Word forms do not change, and in which grammatical functions are shown by word order and the use of function words, e. g. in Mandarin Chinese: jzi w chi le orange I eat (function word) I ate the orange w ch le jzi le I eat (f.w.) orange (f.w.) I ate an orange Languages, which are highly isolating include Chinese, Samoan, and Vietnamese.

Polysynthetic (Incorporating) Languages

Different parts of the utterance are united in the form of amorphous word-stems (roots). Their unity gets auxiliary elements. Compound words look like sentences. Words are very long, containing a mixture of agglutinative and inflectional features. In Tiwi ngirruunthingapukani (I kept on eating) is: ngi rru unthing apu kani I past tense for some time eat repeatedly Chukot, Eskimo, Papuan, and the languages of American Indians & Australian aborigines possess such features.

SYNTACTIC CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAUGES

(I. I. Meshchaninovs classification)

1) passive;

2) nominative; 3) ergative .

PHONETIC CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

(O. Isachenkos Classification)
Vocalic Languages; Consonantal Languages.

LANGUAGE CHANGE
REASONS

INTERNAL
Democratic Learning; Printing; Mass

EXTERNAL
Communication; Expressive

Society;

media; Language contacts.

& information functions; Language norm; Language potential.