|
Fusional languages.
Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from
the root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be
fused into one affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by internal
phonological changes in the root (i.e. morphophonology), such as consonant
gradation and vowel gradation, or by suprasegmental features such as stress or
tone, which are of course inseparable from the root.
Most Indo-European languages are fusional to a varying degree. A
remarkably high degree of fusionality is also found in certain Sami languages
such as Skolt Sami.
Polysynthetic languages.
In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a third category for
classifying languages, a category that he labeled "polysynthetic". (The term
"polysynthesis" was first used in linguistics by Peter Stephen DuPonceau who
borrowed it from chemistry.) These languages have a high morpheme-to-word
ratio, a highly regular morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include
morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject
("polypersonalism"). Another feature of polysynthetic languages is commonly
41
expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences
in other languages". Of course, this is rather useless as a defining feature,
since it is tautological ("other languages" can only be defined by opposition to
polysynthetic ones and vice versa).
Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one
example, for instance, the word-phrase: "tavvakiqutiqarpiit" roughly translates
to "Do you have any tobacco for sale?".
Note that no clear division exists between synthetic languages and
polysynthetic languages; the place of one language largely depends on its
relation to other languages displaying similar characteristics on the same
scale.
Morphological typology in reality
Each of the types above is idealizations; they do not exist in a pure state
in reality. Although they generally fit best into one category, "all" languages
are mixed types. English is synthetic, but it is more analytic than Spanish and
much more analytic than Latin. Chinese is the usual model of analytic
languages, but it does have some bound morphemes. Japanese is highly
synthetic (agglutinative) in its verbs, but clearly analytic in its nouns. For
these reasons, the scale above is continuous and relative, not absolute. It is
difficult to classify a language as absolutely analytic or synthetic, as a
language could be described as more synthetic than Chinese, but less synthetic
than Korean.
Morphology is the identification, analysis, and description of the
structure of words (words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of
lexicology). While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the
smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words
can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers
recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dogcatcher are closely related.
English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the
rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs
as cat is to cats; similarly, thedog is to dogcatcher as thedish is to
42
thedishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns
(or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how
those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch
of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across
languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the
speakers of those languages.
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a
language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. A
morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the
two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by
definition, is freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered a root
because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it
depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has
a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every
word comprises one or more morphemes.
General classification of the morpheme according to the role in the
word is similar in compared languages. They can be classified as free and
bound morphemes. While in Uzbek and Russian, they are called root and
affixed morphemes.
Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog)
and can appear with other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction
with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un-
appears only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound
morphemes in English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes.
Examples of suffixes are -tion, -ation, -ible, -ing, etc. Bound morphemes that
are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.
Bound morphemes in the compared languages can be compared as
follows:
Bound morpheme
English
Russian
Uzbek
Derived
Inflection
Lexical
Inflectional
Prefix
Affixed
Suffix
Affixoid
Postfix
Interfix
According to the function of morphemes, they are subdivided into
lexeme forming and form forming morphemes in Russian and Uzbek. The
main function of lexeme forming morpheme is to form new lexeme from
43
existing one (
бодр-ость, бодр-о; ishchi-, ishla-, ishchan).
Form forming
morphemes serve for forming forms of the same word without changing its
lexical meaning (
бодр-ый – бодр-ая – бодр-ое; ishchilar, ishchini).
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
