Comparative Typology Answers to the questions

Comparative Typology

Answers to the questions

1. 
   Comparative typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural and functional features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world’s languages.
   

10. Language universals are bound to the unification of language facts, identifying common/similar features specific to systems of all or separate language groups. There are a lot of kinds of language universals. They are : semantic universals, deductive, inductive, synchronic, diachronic, universals of speech, universals of language.

9. Etalon language is an object language for comparative typology and it is also a means or system of tools to compare languages. The notion of etalon language was introduced by Boris Uspenskiy.

6. Phonological typology deals with the comparison of units of language. It engages in the allocation of phonological structure of languages, classification of languages on the basis of their phonological features defining the phonemic structure of world languages and many others.

7. Syntactic typology engages in a comparison of syntactic level units. The basic units for comparison are word combination and the sentence.

2. Historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics in which an investigation of the history of languages is used to learn about how languages are related, how languages change, and what languages were like hundreds and even thousands of years ago — even before written records of a language. Typological study of language is concerned with assessing the structural features according to which languages may differ. ... Finally, areal comparative linguistics classifies languages into language areas, sets of languages that influenced each other during periods of intensive language contact.

5. Linguists try to find common features. This common features are called linguistic universals. (we may speak about: semantic, phonological, syntactic, grammatical universals.)When the same universals are typical with the number of lang-s we speak about a type. Structural classification contains 4 groups: 1. isolating, 2. flextional, 3. agglutinative, 4. incorporative. But lang-s are never pure type. They usually combine elements of a variety of types but some features prevail. This classification was put forward by german linguist Humboldt. Friedrich Schlegel classified languages into two types: inflexional (having word endings) and non-inflexional (having affixes). His brother August Schlegel suggested distinguished 3 types: -languages without any grammatical structure (showing grammar relations by word order Chinese); - lang-s which use affixes; - with inflections. Wilhelm Humboldt added one more group and gave all the types the names by which they are still known: 1. flexional languages. Grammar relations are shown in these languages by means of polysemantic morphemes. e.g. Рус. временной The inflexion -ой belongs to an adjective of masculine gender, singular, in nominative case. Roots can very rarely be used as a separate word (c.f. *врем). Indo-European and Semitic languages belong to inflexional languages. 2. Agglutinating languages. Grammar relations are shown by a series of monosemantic morphemes, "glued" to each other. e.g. Turkish: Okul (школа) - okullar (школы) - okullarimiz (наши школы) - okkularimizda (в наших школах). Roots can be used as independent words (c.f. okul) 3. Isolating languages. They have no word changing morphemes. Grammar relations are shown by word order. The Chinese language belongs to this group. 4. Polysynthetic languages. (incorporating) Words in the languages of this group are united so that a phrase or a sentence may consist of a single word. Such structure is found in the Chukchi language, some Indian languages. Scholars used to think that the types of languages corresponded to stages of language development. So they thought that once every language was isolating by its structure and through the other stages is to become flexional sooner or later. Some looked upon this process as "perfecting" of the language, others thought it to be "degrading". Modern linguistics is against the idea of "better" or "worse" languages.

3. the comparative method aims at establishing the isomorphic(alongside of allomorphic) features and on their basis the determining of structural types of languages under contrastive investigation;

-the deductive method is based on logical calculation which suggests all the possible variants of realization of a certain feature/phenomenon in speech of one or more contrasted languages;

-the inductive method which needs novarification, since the investigated feature was proved by linguists and therefore the results obtained are possible;

-the statistic method for establishing the necessary quantitative and qualitative representation of some features or for identifying the percentage of co-ocurrence of some features or linguistic units in the contrasted languages;

-the IC (immediate constituents) method is employed to contrast only linguistic units for investigating their constituent parts in one or some contrasted languages;

-transformational method for identifying the nature of a linguistic unit in the source language or for determining the difference in the form of expression in the contrasted languages.

4. A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. There are over 100 language families in the world. The most widespread language families are:The Indo-European Family

The most widely studied family of languages and the family with the largest number of speakers. Languages include English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Greek, Hindi, Bengali; and the classical languages of Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian.

The Uralic Family

A family found in Europe (Hungarian, Finnish) and Siberia (Mordvin) with complex noun structures.

The Altaic Family

A family spread from Europe (Turkish) through Centra Asia (Uzbek), Mongolia (Mongolian), to the Far East (Korean, Japanese). These languages have the interesting property of vowel harmony.

The Sino-Tibetan Family

An important Asian family of languages that includes the world's most spoken language, Mandarin. These languages are monosyllabic and tonal.

The Malayo-Polynesian Family

A family consisting of over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South East Asia. Languages include Malay, Indonesian, Maori and Hawaiian.

The Afro-Asiatic Family

This family contains languages of northern Africa and the Middle East. The dominant languages are Arabic and Hebrew.

The Caucasian Family

A family based around the Caucas Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Georgian and Chechen are the main languages. They are known for their large number of consonants.

The Dravidian Family

The languages of southern India (in contrast to the Indo-European languages of northern India). Tamil is the best known of these languages.

Austro-Asiatic Family

This family are a scattered group of languages in Asia. They are found from eastern India to Vietnam. Languages include Vietnamese and Khmer.

Niger-Congo Family

This family features the many languages of Africa south of the Sahara. The large number of languages include Swahili, Shona, Xhosa and Zulu

8. In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an analytic language.

Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic, and meaning is therefore very context-dependent.

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination: words may contain different morphemes to determine their meaning, but each of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remains in every aspect unchanged after their union, thus resulting in generally easier deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word, generally for shortening the word on behalf of an easier pronunciation. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt to classify languages from a morphological point of view.[1] It is derived from the Latin verb agglutinative, which means “to glue together”.[2]

Agglutinative language

A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to overlay many morphemes to denote grammatical, syntactic, or semantic change. For example, the Spanish language verb comer (“to eat”) can be expressed in first-person past preterite tense as comí, a word formed removing the “-er” suffix of the verb and replacing it by “-í”, that indicate such specific meaning.

Tests

1. 
   A
   
2. 
   C
   
3. 
   A
   
4. 
   A,d
   
5. 
   A
   
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