Week 2: Classifying Language

 Classifying Language

Geneological classification: (Proto-Indoeuropean - Indoeuropean - Romance Languages)

    • We cannot purely use this method of classification as some languages escape it. E.g Albanian has some features that belong to the Indoeuropean family and other features that belong to other language families
Morphological Classification:

    • Morpheme = the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words
Isolating Languages
    • In which each grammatical category is represented by a separate word. 1 word = 1 separate function
      • wo ai ni = I love you
      • ni ai wo = you love me
    • Chinese and Vietnamese are isolating languages
  • Tonal Languages
    • Some isolating languages are tonal. This means that the meaning of the word changes when it is pronounced differently
Agglutinating Languages
  • In which words are easily divided into separate segments with separate grammatical functions
    • E.g from Turkish 'Ev' = home and 'in' = genitive so 'evin' = of the home
  • The Swahili Language:
    • mtoto amefika = The child has arrived
    • mtoto anafika = The child is arriving
    • mtoto atafika = The child will arrive
Fusional or Inflected Languages
  • In which several semantic-functional categories are 'merged' into a single morpheme. The boundaries between one morpheme and the others lose visibility, segmentation becomes difficult and exceptions proliferate.
    • e.g in Italian 'buono'. The o makes it both singular and masculine (in one single morpheme there are multiple grammatical categories)
  • Infixing Languages
    • In which the relationship between content units and expression units follows the pattern of inflectional languages, without the morphemes being arranged in linear order. These are languages with a concatenative morphology, which envisage a "comb" collocation by intertwining a root and particular vowel sequences, placed between the radical consonants, which have the role of expressing the essential lexical and grammatical specifications.
      • Arabic:
        • K-t-b --- Kitaba (to write), Kitab (book), Kutub (books), Katib (writer), Kutubi (book seller)
Polysynthetic Languages
  • They combine within the same unit an impressive number of lexical or grammatical morphology, condensing into a single word information that in Italian/French/Spanish etc would normally require the construction of an entire sentence
    • Siberian Yupik
      • Angya-ghlla-ng-yug-tuq = he wants to buy a boat
English has attributes of many of the categories - e.g auxiliary verbs like 'will' are like isolating languages, whereas words like 'taller' are like agglutinating languages

Order of the Constituents
  • SVO - 42% of all languages
  • SOV - 45% of all languages
  • VSO - c.9% of all languages
  • VOS - c.3% of all languages
    OVS -  tiny petcentage
  • OSV - very rare (YODA)
Linguistic Universals
  1. All languages have vowels and consonants
  2. All languages have oral vowels
  3. All languages have vocalic phones including i,a,u
  4. All languages have syllables (consonant + vowel)
  5. All languages have words and phrases
  6. All languages have a prenominal system including at least 3 persons and singular and plural
  7. All languages have a negative construction
             - Coined by Joseph Greensburg

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