Questions tagged [morphological-typology]
The morphological-typology tag has no usage guidance.
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List of counter examples + statistics of Greenberg's universal
I could not find a list of counter examples/ statistics of Greenberg's linguistic universals.
There are numbers that I could find relevant information on WALS. There are some I could not find anything....
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Did big languages generally have a net loss of inflectional morphology in the past 1-3 millennia and small languages the other way round?
a.
R. M. W. Dixon (1998) theorizes that languages normally evolve in a cycle from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again like a clock. There are two opposing forces: one reduces ...
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What are all the ways to formulate a word?
Consider the formula according to which Sanskrit and most Indo-European languages formulate the word:
[prefix] root + suffix + ending.
And now consider the formula according to which Semitic languages ...
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Dependent-marking on adpositions?
Is there a language such that an adposition is dependent-marked so that one can infer that it depends on head X but not Y?
As a possible example, an affix is attached to an adposition to show that it ...
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How would you classify a verb that denotes a close temporal relation to another verb?
I am looking at a Papuan language that uses a serialized verb to denote temporal proximity to the main verb's occurrence. I am translating it as "just" in English, as in "he just left&...
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Head-marked possessive with gender agreement
Are there any languages that have head marking in possessive noun phrases, but that also agree that marking with gender? Essentially so that a morpheme would be on the possessee and would look at ...
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Why is Hungarian considered a mostly agglutinative language?
Hungarian is often used as the prototypical example of a heavily agglutinative, synthetic language, and with regards to noun declension and derivational morphology this is doubtless true; Hungarian ...
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inflected languages other than IE and Semitic ones
When one looks for examples of inflected languages outside the Indo-European and, perhaps, Semitic domains, it seems that there is none. Does anyone here know other examples in different linguistic ...
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Is there any language that has different morphology for individual-level and stage-level adjectives?
For example, the language might be such that a a stage-level adjective like "available" would agree in predicative position, but an individual-level adjective like "intelligent" would not.
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Grammatical case vs semantic case
I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case,...
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What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?
I have searched by corpus and found variant results for the same number above. People also hesitate with these numbers and make different sortation. Is there any research about any psycolinguistical ...
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Are the hebrew prefix letters (משה וכלב) considered a form of agglutination?
An example of this letters can be seen in the word וכשלהתמרמרויותינו
where the וכש at start mean "and during to" (the entire word means "and during to our grumblings).
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References to languages lacking morphology in scientific literature
Are there any references of natural languages lacking morphology in the scientific literature? I suppose there should be, given the topic's importance and the popular opinion on this, but so far all I'...
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How are nominal predicates expressed in active-stative languages?
Based on my reading, Active–Stative languages typically feature the core arguments of Agent (AGN) and Patient (PAT). While the precise rules differ by language, it seems to be that for intransitive ...
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Are there languages in which adverbs inflect?
Are there any languages in which adverbs (in the sense of verb modifiers) inflect to match the verb they modify?
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What are some of the most prefixing languages?
Turkish is commonly cited as an example of a language which is, with only one or two quirky exceptions, exclusively suffixing. Cross-linguistically, suffixing is much commoner than prefixing and I ...
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Metric For Morphological Richness Across Languages
Does a metric exist that quantifies morphological richness in languages? Either a numerical score, or at least a ranking of languages would suffice.
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How to distinguish a polysynthetic language from other languages? When is something a word?
For example, the probably most quoted sentence in a polysynthetic langauge (from Yupik):
tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq:
tuntu- ssur- qatar- ni- ksaite- ngqiggte- uq
reindeer- hunt- FUT- ...
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Possible connection between PIE Ablaut and Semitic vowel alternation
Since I started to read about language typology and then got a hint about PIE ablaut system I have been wondering if there might be any prehistorical connection between these families at least ...
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TAM categories: Can they be predicted from their numbers (a language's TAM inventory size)?
To some extent, vowels can be predicted based on the size of the vowel inventory, so, for example, in a 3-vowel system, it will be /a i u/, whereas in a 4-vowel system, we will get /a i u ɛ/ or /a i u ...
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Is the idea of "simultaneity" in sign language as opposed to "linearity" in spoken language really tenable?
I have seen scholars claim that...
"sign languages are simultaneous whereas spoken languages are linear".
In my opinion, however, the notion of "linearity" vs. "simultaneity" is misleading at best....
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Distinguishing "Eskimo"/"Inuit" languages by the passive agent morpheme
In The Origin of Agent Markers by Enrique L. Palancar an attempt has been made to list morphemes used both 1.) as a case morpheme belonging to a noun and 2.) as a morpheme on such nouns that express ...
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What approaches exist to categorizing kinds of passive agent markers and what are their advantages?
For my thesis I would like to conduct a study on the cross-linguistic distribution of agent markers in passives.
In English, this marker is usually realized by the preposition 'by', as in (including a ...
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What is the distinction between agglutinative languages and polysynthetic ones?
My understanding of morphology is that a word is taken and many different words are glued to it.
Is not this true for both agglutinative and polysynthetic languages? Or what is the finer level of ...
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How is "Writer/reader-responsible language" correlated with synthetic/analytic languages?
This blog post suggests a rather interesting concept of writer/reader -responsible languages.
Basically, this quote expresses the idea:
English is a writer-responsible language.
That means it is ...
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What sort of morpheme is this suffix meaning ‘about'?
Some background: This is a conlang that I'm developing as part of my job. It's a difficult task, but I want to make it as realistic as possible. I have to make a detailed grammar so that other ...
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Which prefixing language has the most speakers?
Most if not all national or widely spoken languages with an inflecting or agglutinating typology do all of their inflecting at the end of the word. These are called "suffixing languages".
This is ...
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Affix that makes nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns?
I have a friend studying a language from the pacific islands, and she found an affix that when added to a noun makes a verb and when added to a verb makes a noun. What would you call such a thing, and ...
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Citations for morpheme/word counts?
(Edited to provide context and clarify what I'm interested in)
Context: I am reading a paper that involves comparing German, Dutch, and English. German is the outlier for the phenomena and measures ...
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How many morphological cases does Portuguese have?
In WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures), "Number of Cases" is listed for most languages. However, this information is absent for Portuguese.
Does Portuguese have any morphological case marking? ...
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Where is Welsh on the analytic/synthetic spectrum?
I believe it's traditionally been held to be more on the synthetic side of the spectrum, but why? Are there any quantitative analyses to back this up?
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What are the alternate morphological typologies to isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysyntehtic, etc.?
The above typology seems to also be called "Humboldt-Schleicherian".
While reading this answer in the question "Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when ...
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