Morphological Types of Languages - Home | Linguistics

[Pages:34]Morphological Typology

Ling 100 ? Introduction to Linguistic Science Guest Lecture ? Jonathan Manker 26 February 2016

What is Typology?

? Linguistic typology is a branch of linguistics that attempts to categorize languages based on similarities in structure (phonological inventories, grammatical constructions, word order, etc.)

Typological Map of Consonant Inventory Sizes

Morphological Typology

? Languages have a wide variety of morphological processes available (e.g. different types of affixation, etc.) for creating words and word forms.

? However, languages vary with respect to what morphological processes are available, how frequently they are used, and what types of information can be encoded in these processes.

? In this lecture, we'll look at differences in morphology among a variety of languages and learn to categorize these languages based on their morphological patterns.

What is a word?

? Before we discuss properties of word structure in different languages, we have to define what it is we mean when we refer to something as a `word.'

? Question: Think about the two strings of sounds below. How many words are in each?

[?kwkbanfaksd mpsov?lezidg] [?ntadsst?blmnteinzm]

? So what makes [?kwkbanfaksd mpsov?lezidg] a sentence, but [?ntadsst?blmnteinzm] a word? (Both have 7-8 morphemes)

? There is no universal expectation for what words should be like in different languages. We will see examples in other languages that are structurally similar to the first, but are considered a single word.

The Phonological Word

? Even for speakers of non-written languages there seems to be a concept of the word which is in some ways psychologically relevant.

? These intuitions about what words are often coincide with the domain of certain phonological rules which are sensitive to word boundaries and the word as a unit of structure and organization. These are usually language specific.

? Stress. In English, each content word will have exactly one primary stress. Do the following examples all seem like single words? Where is their primary stress?

? dehumidifier ? recapitulation ? antidisestablishmentarianism

Phonological Evidence for the word

? Some languages have vowel harmony that applies to entire words--for example, in Turkish all the vowels in most words must be all front vowels or all back vowels. We never find vowel harmony occurring over entire sentences.

? /el-ler-in/ `hand'-PLR-gen. vs. /at-lar-n/ `horse,'-PLR-gen.

? We've also discussed phonotactic considerations: certain sequences of sounds cannot occur within syllables, but may be permissible over word boundaries (e.g. [dzm], above in `words must')

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