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Polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word . Except for the morpheme "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement, although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic also have it, such as Basque, Hungarian and Georgian. Some authors apply the term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking, or t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morphological Typology
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noun Incorporation
In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. The inclusion of a noun qualifies the verb, narrowing its scope rather than making reference to a specific entity. Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, Siberia and northern Australia. However, polysynthesis does not necessarily imply incorporation (Mithun 2009), and the presence of incorporation does not imply that the language is polysynthetic. Examples of incorporation English Although incorporation does not occur regularly, English uses it sometimes: ''breastfeed'', and direct object incorporation, as in ''babysit''. Etymologically, such verbs in English are usually back-formations: the verbs ''breastfeed'' and ''babysit'' are formed from the adjective ''breast-fed'' and the noun ''babysitter' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synthetic Language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be either relational or derivational. While a derivational morpheme changes the syntactic category, lexical categories of words, an inflectional morpheme does not. In the first example below, the adjective ''fast'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''faster'', which is still an adjective. However, the verb ''teach'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''teacher'', which is a noun. The first case is an example of inflection and the latter derivation. * ''fast'' (adjective, positive) vs. ''faster'' (adjective, co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called ''conjugation'', and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as ''declension''. An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ', meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix ', expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word ''lead'' is not inflected for any of pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yupik Language
The Yupik languages () are a family of languages spoken by the Yupik peoples of western and south-central Alaska and Chukotka. The Yupik languages differ enough from one another that they are not mutually intelligible, although speakers of one of the languages may understand the general idea of a conversation of speakers of another of the languages. One of them, Sirenik, has been extinct since 1997. The Yupik languages are in the family of Eskimo–Aleut languages. The Aleut and Eskimo languages diverged around 2000 BC (contemporaneous with the split of Indo-Iranian); within the Eskimo classification, the Yupik languages diverged from each other and from the Inuit language around 1000 AD. List of languages # Naukan Yupik (also Naukanski): spoken by perhaps 100 people in and around Lavrentiya, Lorino, and Uelen on the Chukotka Peninsula of Eastern Siberia. # Central Siberian Yupik (also Yupigestun, Akuzipigestun, Akuzipik, Siberian Yupik, Siberian Yupik Eskimo, Centr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pro-drop Language
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages, and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null dummy pronoun. Pro-drop is licensed only in languages that have a positive setting of the pro-drop parameter, which allows the null element to be identified by its governor. Pro-drop is a problem when translating to a non-pro-drop language such as English, which requires the pronoun to be added, especially noticeable in machine translation. Amongst other reasons, it can also pose a problem with respect to transfer errors and second language acquisition. Non-pro-drop is an areal f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isolating Language
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Igbo in West Africa and Vietnamese (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia. A closely related concept is that of an analytic language, which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified. However, analytic languages such as English may still contain polymorphemic words in part because of the presence of derivational morphemes. Isolating languages contrast with synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined. Explanation Although historically ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polypersonal Agreement
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages. In non-polypersonal languages, the verb either shows no agreement at all or agrees with the primary argument (in English, the subject). In a language with polypersonal agreement, the verb has agreement morphemes that may indicate (as applicable) the subject, the direct object, the indirect or secondary object, the beneficiary of the verb action, etc. This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed). Polysynthesis often includes polypersonalism, which in turn is a form of head-marking. Polypersonalism has also been correlated with ergativity. Examples of languages with polypersonal agreement are the Bantu lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large number of language isolates), as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified because of a lack of data. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most notorious is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which however nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. Nonetheless, there are indications that some of the recognized families are related to each other, such as widespread similarities in pronouns (e.g., ''n''/''m'' is a common pattern for 'I'/'you' across western North America, and ''ch''/''k''/''t'' for 'I'/'you'/'we' is similarly found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inuit Languages
The Inuit languages are a closely related group of indigenous American languages traditionally spoken across the North American Arctic and adjacent subarctic, reaching farthest south in Labrador. The related Yupik languages (spoken in western and southern Alaska, as well as in nearby Russia's farthest east, though severely endangered there) are the two main branches of Eskaleut, a primary language family. The Inuit live primarily in three countries: Greenland (Kingdom of Denmark), Canada (specifically in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, the Nunavik region of Quebec, and the Nunatsiavut and Nunatuĸavut regions of Labrador), and the United States (specifically the coast of Alaska). The total population of Inuit speaking their traditional languages is difficult to assess with precision, since most counts rely on self-reported census data that may not accurately reflect usage or competence. Greenland census estimates place the number of speakers of varieties of Inuit languages th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Baker (linguist)
Mark Cleland Baker (born 1959) is an American linguist. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985 and has taught at Rutgers University since 1998. Baker frequently was a faculty member at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute and, prior to coming to Rutgers, was a faculty member at McGill University (1986–1998). He worked with the Mohawk language for several years, also serving as a consultant on language revitalization for the Mohawk. Working within generative grammar, he has written several books about the formal analysis of polysynthetic languages. Bibliography *''Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing'' (University of Chicago Press, 1988) * ''The Polysynthesis Parameter'' (Oxford University Press, 1996) * ''The Atoms of Language'' (Basic Books, 2001) * ''Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives'' (Cambridge University Press, 2002) * ''The Syntax of Agreement and Concord'' (Cambridge University Press, 2008) * ''The Soul Hypothesis: Inve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agglutinative Language
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain unchanged after their unions, although this is not a rule: for example, Finnish is a typical agglutinative language, but morphemes are subject to (sometimes unpredictable) consonant alternations called consonant gradation. Despite the occasional outliers, agglutinative languages tend to have more easily deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow unpredictable modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word. This usually results in a shortening of the word, or it provides easier pronunciation. Overview Agglutinative languages have generally one grammatical category per affix while fusional languages have multiple. The term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
