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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
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.
Bound morphemes in the compared languages can be compared as follows:
Bound morpheme
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English
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Russian
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Uzbek
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Derived
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Inflection
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Lexical
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Inflectional
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Prefix
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Affixed
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Suffix
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Affixoid
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Postfix
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Interfix
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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).
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