Morphological Typology

Question 1

Languages can differ in two primary ways; Degree of fusion and degree of synthesis. What are these

Answer 1

Degree of fusion: how ‘clear’ morpheme boundaries are
Degree of synthesis: how ‘packed’ words are with morphemes

Question 2

Specific degrees of synthesis

Answer 2

isolating/analytic: tendency to have just one morpheme per word
Synthetic: tendency to have several morphemes per word
Polysynthetic: very high number of morphemes per word (entire sentence in one word)

Question 3

What’s synthetic versus perphrastic?

Answer 3

Synthetic = morphological
periphrastic = syntactic

Question 4

Two degrees of fusion: agglutinative v. fusional: define them

Answer 4

Agglutinative: relatively clear morpheme boundaries (ex. Turkish)
Fusional: morpheme boundaries are not clear/transparent

It’s relative and exists on a spectrum

Question 5

What’s exponentiality? Monoexponential v. polyexponential morphemes?

Answer 5

Grammatical morphemes can be classified based on exponentiality;
monoexponential morphemes: single grammatical meaning/category
polyexponential morpheme: more than one grammatical meaning/category