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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, such as Basque, Hungarian and Georgian, also have it. 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morphological Typology
Morphological typology is a linguistic typology, way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common Morphology (linguistics), morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic language, Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic language, Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative language, agglutinative and fusional language, 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 ... [...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 (linguistics), compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntax, 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 language, 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 a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synthetic Language
A synthetic language is a language that is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination. Synthetic languages are statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio relative to analytic languages. Fusional languages favor inflection and agglutinative languages favor agglutination. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most belonging to an agglutinative-polysynthetic subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between words. Adding morphemes to a root word is used in inflection to convey a grammatical property of the word, such as denoting a subject or an object. Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, tense, grammatical case, case, grammatical voice, voice, grammatical aspect, aspect, grammatical person, person, grammatical number, number, grammatical gender, gender, grammatical mood, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called ''grammatical conjugation, conjugation'', while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called ''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). Th ... [...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 l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct. The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates, as well as several extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported 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. According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (wit ... [...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 Eskaleut languages. The Aleut and Proto-Eskimoan diverged around 2000 BCE; within the Proto-Eskimoan classification, the Yupik languages diverged from each other and from the Inuit languages around 1000 CE. 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, Central Siberian Yupik Eskimo, St. Lawrence Isla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pro-drop Language
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which 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 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. It can also contribute to transfer errors in language learning. An areal feature of some European languages is that pronoun dropping is not, or seldom, possible (see Standard Average European); this is the case for English, French, German, and Emilian, among others. In contrast, Japanese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agglutinative Language
An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations). In such languages, affixes ( prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes) are added to a root word in a linear and systematic way, creating complex words that encode detailed grammatical information. This structure allows for a high degree of transparency, as the boundaries between morphemes are usually clear and their meanings consistent. Agglutinative languages are a subset of synthetic languages. Within this category, they are distinguished from fusional languages, where morphemes often blend or change form to express multiple grammatical functions, and from polysynthetic languages, which can combine numerous morphemes into single words with complex meanings. Examples of agglutinative languages include Turkish, Finnish, Japane ... [...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 Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters pat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inuit Languages
The Inuit languages are a closely related group of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages traditionally spoken across the North American Arctic and the adjacent subarctic regions as far south as Labrador. The Inuit languages are one of the two branches of the Eskimoan languages, Eskimoan language family, the other being the Yupik languages, which are spoken in Alaska and the Russian Far East. Most Inuit people live in one of three countries: Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark; Canada, specifically in Nunavut, the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the Northwest Territories, the Nunavik region of Quebec, and the Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut regions of Labrador; and the United States, specifically in northern and western 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 re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verbs
A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle ''to'', is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; and future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb ''will'' or ''shall''. For example: * Lucy ''will go'' to school. ''(action, future)'' *Barack Obama ''became'' the President of the United States in 2009. ''(occurrence, past)'' * Mike Trout ''is'' a center fielder. ''(state of being, present ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
