Typology Flashcards
What does typological categories mean?
what type of language it is according to various features of form, meaning and use
What does typology mean?
a division of some range of phenomena into types. To typologize somethins is to group its parts into types.
what are the three major lingustic typologies?
Morphological typology, constituent order (or syntactic) typology and semantic or lexical typology
What is morphology?
the study of shapes. Shape of words and how speakers may change the shapes of words in order to express meaning.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest lingustic unit that can be used to express meaning.
What are the three morphological types?
Isolating languages, agglutinating languages,inflectional or fusional languages
What is the index of synthesis?
Has to do with how many morphemes tend to occur per word.
What is an isolating or analytic language?
A language that only has one morpheme pr.word.
what is a polysynthetic language
a language that has many morphemes pr. word.
What were marked for case in old english?
nouns, determiners, adjectives, pronouns
(nominative, accusative, genitive and dative)
What is the only trace of case system on ordinary nouns today?
The -s ending as in john`s house.
Otherwise it has been lost. But remain intact in the pronoun system.
What is being expressed in a fusional (inflectional) language?
One morpheme can express several meanings.
What is being expressed in an agglutinative languguage?
Most morphemes express only one meaning.
What kind of language is English?
Isolatating agglutinative
Give examples of fusion in English
Strong verb forms such as sang, thought and drove asn certain noun plurals such as feet and mice.
The part that means past tense in the word sang for instance cannot be separted from the root of the word. The past tense and the root is fused together.
