Information about Synthetic Language
linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.) although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties.
Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian-type voice system, is a typologically unusual morphosyntactic alignment that combines features of ergative and accusative languages.
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A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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Synthetic and isolating languages
Synthetic languages are frequently contrasted with isolating languages. It is more accurate to conceive of languages as existing on a continuum, with strictly isolating (consistently one morpheme per word) at one end and highly polysynthetic (in which a single word may contain as much information as an entire English sentence) at the other extreme. Synthetic languages tend to lie around the middle of this scale.Specimens
Synthetic languages are numerous and well-attested, the most commonly cited being Indo-European languages such as German, Spanish, Russian, Polish and Czech, as well as many languages of the Americas, including Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk and Quechua. It is likely that Interlingua can be considered a synthetic language.Forms of synthesis
There are several ways in which a language can exhibit synthetic characteristics:Derivational synthesis
In derivational synthesis, morphemes of different types (nouns, verbs, affixes, etc.) are joined to create new words. For example:- German: Luftkissenfahrzeug => "air-cushion-travel-device" meaning "hovercraft"
- Greek: yperkholisterolaimia => "overmuch/high-cholesterol-blood+-ia(suffix)" meaning "hypercholesterolemia"
- English: unthinkably => "not-think-possible-(adverb)"
- Russian: спасибо => "god-save-you" (thank you)
- English: antidisestablishmentarianism => "against-ending-institutionalize-condition-advocate-ideology"
Relational synthesis
In relational synthesis, root words are joined to bound morphemes to show grammatical function:- Spanish: escribiéndomelo => "writing-me-it" meaning "(while) writing it to me".
- Nahuatl: ocaltizquiya => "already-(she)-him-bathe-would" meaning "she would have bathed him"
- Japanese: miseraregatai => "see-causative-passive-difficult" meaning "it's difficult to be shown (this)"
- Finnish: juoksentelisinkohan => "run-erratic motion-conditional-I-question-casual" meaning "I wonder if I should run around (aimlessly)"
- Finnish: hiutaleannos => "flake-ration"; hiuta+le has the components hiutua meaning "to thin" and -le meaning "a small thing produced by the action", and ann+os is derived from antaa meaning "to give" and -os meaning "a mass transferred or made by the action".
- Turkish: Afyonkarahisarlilastiramayabileceklerimizdenmissiniz => meaning "apparently you may be amongst the ones that we will not be able to make a Afyonkarahisar citizen."
Degrees of synthesis
In order to demonstrate the "continuum" nature of the isolating-synthetic-polysynthetic classification, some examples are shown below:Strictly isolating
Rather isolating
English: "He travelled by hovercraft on the sea." Largely isolating, but travelled and hovercraft each have two morphemes per word, the former being an example of relational synthesis (inflection), and the latter of derivational synthesis (derivation).Rather synthetic
Japanese: Watashitachi ni totte, kono naku kodomo no shashin wa miseraregatai mono desu means strictly literally, "In our case, these pictures of children crying are things that are difficult to be shown," approximately We cannot bear being shown these pictures of children crying in more idiomatic English. In the example, virtually every word has more than one morpheme and some have up to five (the particles ni, no, wa are enclitic case markers, i.e., they are phonologically part of the previous word).Very synthetic
Finnish: Käyttäytyessään tottelemattomasti oppilas saa jälki-istuntoa means "Should he/she behave in an insubordinate manner, the student will get detention." Structurally: behaviour(present/future tense)(of his/hers) insubordinate(in the manner/style) studying(he/she who (should be)) gets detention(some). Practically every word is derived and/or inflected, and one word can be considered polysynthetic. This is, however, very formal language - almost like judicial text - and usually replaced by more analytic structure: Kun oppilas käyttäytyy tottelemattomasti, hän saa jälki-istuntoa.Polysynthetic
Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se means "He ruined her dress" (strictly, "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her"). One word expresses the idea that would be conveyed in an entire sentence in a non-polysynthetic language.Oligosynthesis
Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by Benjamin Whorf with no known examples existing in natural languages. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). Whorf proposed that Nahuatl was oligosynthetic, but this has since been discounted by most linguists.See also
External links
- SIL: What is a morphological process?
- SIL: What is derivation?
- SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation
- Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection, Derivation
- Lexicon of Linguistics: Base, Stem, Root
Linguistic Typology is an international peer-reviewed journal in the field of linguistic typology, founded in 1997. It is published by Mouton de Gruyter on behalf of the Association for Linguistic Typology. Its editor-in-chief is Prof. Frans Plank (University of Konstanz).
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Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures.
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fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment.
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An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view.
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Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes.
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Definition
The degree of synthesis refers to the morpheme-to-word ratio. Languages with more than one morpheme per word are synthetic...... Click the link for more information.
An oligosynthetic language (from the Greek ὀλίγος, meaning "few" or "little") is any language using very few morphemes, perhaps only a few hundred, which combine synthetically to form statements.
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In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs. The distinction can be made morphologically (through grammatical case or verbal agreement), syntactically (through word
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A nominative-accusative language (or simply accusative language) is one that marks the direct object of transitive verbs distinguishing them from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs.
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An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.
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Ergative vs.
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Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian-type voice system, is a typologically unusual morphosyntactic alignment that combines features of ergative and accusative languages.
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An active-stative language, or active language for short, is one in which the sole argument of an intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way as the agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject in English), and sometimes in the same way as the direct object
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A tripartite language, also called an ergative-accusative language, is one that treats the subject of an intransitive verb, the subject of a transitive verb, and the object of a transitive verb each in different ways.
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A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction. The direct construction is used when the subject of the transitive clause outranks the object in saliency or animacy but the
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The syntactic pivot is the verb argument around which sentences "revolve", in a given language. This usually means the following:
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- If the verb has more than zero arguments, then one argument is the syntactic pivot.
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theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure (the number and type of noun phrases) required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments (i.e., it is ditransitive).
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In linguistic typology, word order is the order in which words appear in sentences. In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions.
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In linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the verb typically comes before the object (thus including SVO, VOS and VSO languages). It was W.P. Lehmann who first proposed to reduce the six possible permutations of word order to just two main ones, VO and OV, in
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In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO), is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements.
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Verb Subject Object (VSO) is a term in linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these constituents in neutral expressions: Ate Sam oranges.
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In linguistic typology, Verb Object Subject or Verb Object Agent - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS or VOA - represents the language-classification type in which the following sequence of the three constituents, in neutral expressions, is
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In linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the verb. They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, i.e. heads are often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place
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In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence.
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Object Subject Verb (OSV) or Object Agent Verb (OAV) is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. OSV or OAV denotes the sequence "Object Subject Verb" in neutral expressions: Oranges Sam ate.
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Object Verb Subject (OVS) or Object Verb Agent (OVA) is one of the permutations of expression used in linguistic typology. OVS denotes the sequence 'Object Verb Subject' in unmarked expressions: Oranges ate Sam, Thorns have roses.
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Time Manner Place (TMP) describes one possible ordering of adpositional phrases in sentences.
Linguistic typology has observed that TMP order is common among Subject Object Verb (SOV) languages.
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- Example: ... yesterday, by car, to the store.
Linguistic typology has observed that TMP order is common among Subject Object Verb (SOV) languages.
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Place Manner Time is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of adpositional phrases in a language's sentences: "to the store by car yesterday". It would seem that it is common among SVO languages. English, French, and Spanish belong to this category.
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Linguistic Typology is an international peer-reviewed journal in the field of linguistic typology, founded in 1997. It is published by Mouton de Gruyter on behalf of the Association for Linguistic Typology. Its editor-in-chief is Prof. Frans Plank (University of Konstanz).
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.
A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the
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