Introducing English Linguistics

Typological classifications of languages
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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ways that languages can be typologically classified along morphological
and syntactic lines.
Typological classifications based on morphology
Morphologically, languages have traditionally been classified as being
agglutinative
, isolating, or fusional. Turkish is a very agglutinative lan-
guage because words have a very complex internal structure, and all of the
morphemes in them can be easily identified. For instance, Kornfilt (1990:
630) analyzes the Turkish sentence eve gitmek istiyorum as having the fol-
lowing structure:
(4) ev 
 e
git 
 mek isti
 yor
 um
home 
 dat.
go 
 infin want
 pres. prog.  1 sg.
‘I want (*am wanting) to go home’
The sentence begins with ev (‘home’), which is marked for the dative case
(e). The verbal element comes next, with the verb git (‘go’) followed by an
infinitive marker, mek (equivalent to English to before verbs, as in to go).
The last part of the sentence contains the verb isti (‘want’), a suffix, yor,
which indicates that the sentence is in the present progressive aspect, and
the first person singular pronoun um (‘I’).
At the other end of the spectrum are languages such as Chinese that
are highly isolating. Languages that are isolating contain independent
units that express various kinds of meaning. For instance, in
Mandarin, the phrase rè de tia–nqì (‘hot weather’) has the following
analysis:
(5) rè
de
tia
–nqì
hot
adjective particle
weather
In English, hot would be interpreted as an adjective largely because it is
positioned before the noun weather, a position in English where adjectives
are commonly placed. Chinese, in contrast, has a separate morpheme, de,
that signals that the first word in the noun phrase is an adjective modify-
ing the noun.
Fusional languages can be classified somewhere between agglutinative
and isolating languages. Two languages discussed in the previous section,
Latin and German, are fusional languages because unlike Turkish, they do
not have separate morphemes marking, for instance, case and number.
Instead, the categories of case, number, and gender work in combination
to determine the particular morpheme to be used. In Russian, another
fusional language, the stem 
DYEVUSHKA
(‘girl’), which takes feminine gender,
would be marked as 
DYEVUSHKU
in the accusative singular but 
DYEVUSHOK
in
the accusative plural.
Although the three morphology types constitute separate classes, some
languages exhibit characteristics of more than one type. For instance,
while Old English was a typically fusional language, Modern English has
become increasingly isolating. In Modern English, to give one example,
orthographic s is used to mark possessive nouns in both the singular and
plural (e.g. boy’s and boys’), a system of marking associated with a fusional
The development of English
35

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language. However, -s usually occurs only with animate nouns; inanimate
nouns tend to show possession with a separate word: the preposition of.
Thus, it is more common to find the roof of the house than the house’s roof.
Marking possession with a separate word, of, is indicative of an isolating
system of morphology. In general, English has seen a decline in inflections
and an increase in prepositions as it has developed from Old English to
Modern English.