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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 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
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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 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.
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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 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: 
