Morphological typology refers to the nomenclature of the method used to classify languages depending on the way in which their morphemes are joined together. In one side of the spectrum we can find analytic languages, which only use isolated morphemes. Then we would have agglutinative languages and fusional languages which use bound morphemes, melting them together in order to convey several meanings. Located on the other side of the spectrum are the so called polysynthetic languages, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words.

Nevertheless, before getting into depth in the morphological typology of languages, and also the patterns of word formation, it must be explained the core concept covered within this paper: the concept of word. Although it may seem simplistic, the study and analysis of this concept entails certain difficulty and may vary from one culture/language to another. Most scholars make a distinction between phonological and grammatical word as principal distinctions.

A phonological word can be defined as a prosodic unit not smaller than a syllable (Aikhenvald). It is a string of sounds that behaves as a unit for certain kinds of phonological processes, especially stress and accent. Normally, it is not needed to make a distinction between these two types of words in utterances like linguistics or science. However, there are cases in which this differentiation arises as necessary. For example, in English every phonological word has a main stress. Elements that are written as separate words but do not have their own stress are therefore not phonological words in English (Dixon & Aikhenvald). Let’s consider any random sentence:

The doctors came to pick me.

If we pay attention to the stresses we see that although there are six words in this sentence, only three of them are stressed: doctors, came and pick. Therefore, according to this classification, to pick me would be a single phonological word with pick being its core.

On the other hand, a grammatical word consists of a number of grammatical elements which (i) always occur together, rather than scattered through the clause; (ii) occur in a fixed order, and (iii) have a conventionalised coherence and meaning (Dixon & Aikhenvald).

Finally there are some other distinctions which present the concept of word as orthographic units or lexical units. However, the first classification can be only applied to languages with a writing system.

Traditional morphological typology starting in the 19th century focused on the internal structure of words as the main key for differentiation. These parameters are of two kinds. The first one is based on the transparency of morphological boundaries between the morphemes within a grammatical word, and the second one relates to the degree of internal complexity of words (E. Sapir 1921).

Transparency of word internal boundaries

There are three main classifications based on this parameter: isolating, agglutinative, and fusional.

Isolating languages, also called analytic, show a low ratio of correspondence between words and morphemes, presenting in most cases a one-to-one ratio. Grammatical relations are expressed by separate words instead of by affixes. Sentences are composed of independent roots and it could be said that there is no morphology at all. Let’s consider Vietnamese, which is one of the most isolating languages, with this example from (Thompson 1987):

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We can see that, according to the translation provided, all these words are invariable, presenting no differences even though they can covey several tenses. If we compare this to Spanish for example, in which the number of tenses is huge, it is obvious that we are before totally different language systems. It is in general true that every word in Vietnamese consists of one morpheme; however, the existence of productive compounding and its lexicalisation results in the creation of words of more complicated structure, e.g. hôm nay (today) ‘today’, hôm kia (day that) ‘day before yesterday’, hôm kía (day that; more remote than kia) ‘two days before yesterday’.

Agglutinative languages present long words formed of many morphemes, normally with a one-to-one correspondence between a morpheme and its meaning; therefore, these morphemes are not melted together like in fusional languages. I am going to present this with an extract from Aikhenvald of the Hungarian noun declension paradigm for ember ‘man’:

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As shown above, morphemes are easily differentiated between them and each of them normally only conveys one grammatical meaning. Agglutinative languages tend to have many morphemes per word but their morphology tends to be reasonably regular. Basque, Hungarian or Turkish are classic examples. A noun is easily segmentable into a lexical stem, a number affix and a case affix.

In fusional languages, there is no clear boundary between morphemes, and thus semantically distinct features are usually merged in a single bound form or in closely united bound forms (Aikhenvald). Extracts from Russian nominal paradigms for dom ‘house’ and koska ‘cat’ below illustrate this point:
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If we pay attention to the example above we see that for example the affix -ami cannot be segmented into a marker for number and a marker for case; and in a word like kosek (‘cats’ accusative plural) the stem itself is fused with case and number. Along similar lines, in Latin the final -a of femina ‘woman’ expresses the meanings: nominative case, singular number and feminine gender. This particular case happens still nowadays in all the romance languages although all of them have lost the declensions present in Latin. Therefore in Spanish for example we have perra with -a contributing the singular case and feminine gender opposed to perro.

Internal complexity of words

The second typological parameter in morphology is intimately related to the amount of morphemes per word. This typological dimension is largely complementary to that described before.

As I have explained before, analytic languages tend to have a one-to-one correlation between morphemes and words. Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese are clear examples of this type of languages. In contrast, in synthetic languages a word consists of several morphemes, and there are numerous bound morphemes. As I have mentioned, Hungarian, Russian are good examples, although most European languages could be included here too.

The distinction between analytic and synthetic languages is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, since languages display different degrees of synthesis. The degree of synthesis or analysis in a given language can be calculated, for instance, by dividing the number of morphemes in a sentence by the number of words.

However, polysynthetic languages are characterised by extreme internal complexity of grammatical words. Here, the bound morphemes often express semantic content reserved for lexemes in languages of other types. Polysynthesis basically refers to the possibility of combining large number of morphemes (lexical and grammatical) within one word, as in the following example from West Greenlandic (Fortescue (1994):

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As you can see, the number of morphemes joined together is astonishing. No other language belonging to a different typology has something even close to this. Due to this rarity, the interest in polysynthesis has grown considerably since some decades ago. According to Fortescue, there are some traits that then to cluster in polysynthetic languages, although none of them is defining by itself:

(i) noun stem incorporation within the verbal complex, and incorporation of adjectival stems within nouns (see section 3);

(ii) a large inventory of bound morphemes, together with a limited set of independent stems;

(iii) derivational processes productive in the formation of individual sentences, the verbal word being a minimal sentence;

(iv) pronominal cross-referencing of subjects, objects, and sometimes also of other arguments (obliques, or datives) on the verb, and of possessors on nominal forms;

(v) integration of locational, instrumental and other adverbial elements (manner, etc.) into the verb complex as bound morphemes;

(vi) many possible affixal ‘slots’, just a few of them obligatory, within a verbal word.

Just to illustrate the huge number, and functions, conveyed by morphemes in polysynthetic languages I would like to show this table to you. You can see all the different functions that verbs in Tiwi can have.

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Languages which can be considered almost entirely analytic are the isolating languages of Southeast Asia, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Classical Chinese etc. and the languages of West Africa such as Igbo. The languages of Europe, Asia and North Africa are predominantly synthetic, while polysynthetic languages are concentrated in North and South America, in Siberia, in the North of Australia and in some parts of Papua New Guinea (Foley (1986)).

I have tried throughout this paper to present, classifying and differentiating, following a morphological typology, all the human languages. It must be noted that there is no superior language, and that every language is as useful and as capable of communication. However, as it has been shown, the differences among them are tremendous, and if the monogenesis theory that states that all languages come from the same protolanguage developed in Central/South Africa thousands of years ago it is true, it just amazes me the enormous and rich variety that we have nowadays. However, from a sociolinguistic point of view, this diversity is being lost incredibly fast. Today there are around 6000 languages according to Ethnologue, but due to globalisation and pushing powerful languages, the rhythm of decrease is preoccupying and possibly in the next decades that figure is going to be much smaller.

References

Aikhenvald, Y. Alexandra, Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, Second Edtion, Volume III. Cambridge Unversity Press.

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Second Edition (1997). Cambridge University Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. & Aikhenvald, Y. Alexandra, Word: a Cross Linguistic Typology (2002). Cambridge University Press.

Malouf, Robert, West Greenlandic Noun Incorporation in a Monohierarchical Theory of Grammar. http://bulba.sdsu.edu/~malouf/papers/greenlandic.pdf

*All the images are taken from the paper written by Aikhenvald and although I referenced the authors I cannot find the papers from which they are taken respectively.