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.
Give examples of agglutinative in English
In a word such as walked for instance the past tense -Ed can be distinguished from the root as though it is “glued” on.
What does most of the morphological variation in english tend to be?
Derivational rather than inflectional
What does derivational mean?
Shaping words to express meanings in English involve building or deriving new words from roots and affixes.
What is a clause?
One or more noun phrases combined with a predicating element usally a verb phrase to express a complete thought.
What does constituents mean?
Parts that make up a clause
Constituent order is the same as ?
word order
What does adposition mean?
a cover term for words that are typically called prepositions and postpositions.
what does preposition mean?
precede noun phrases
what does postpositon mean?
follow noun phrases.
what does auxiliary mean?
a small word that combines with a verb to express tense, aspect and mood
What is a comparative construction?
A construction that compares somet item to another item. Usually consists of the marker “than” as in the sentence: She walks faster than he does.
What is a VO language?
auxiliary comes before the verb
VERB-OBJECT LANGUAGE
What is a OV language?
Verb comes before the auxiliary
OBJECT-VERB LANGUAGE
What is lexical typology?
Subfield of lingustics that study teh way languages tend to combine or package meaning components.
What is causation?
For example the verb feed combines the meaning EAT and ENABLE or CAUSE. Feed means enable to eat.
What is manner +motion verbs?
Verbs that combine the concepte of manner with the concept of motion.
EX: a verb such as run ecpresses both the manner (quickly, hurried) with motion to or from some location. The spesific path of motion is usually expressed in a prepositional phrase.
What si meant by cause and effect in one verb?
In a verb such as feed, the idea that someone does something (the cause) to cause or enable someone or something to eat(effect)
The verb feed is distinct from the verb eat.
Can some verbs be used both intransitively and tranistively?
yes! EX: The child is bathing
I am bathing the child
Name the small class of verbs for which the causative and the non-causative are similar but not idential
Lying-laying
rises-raise
fall-fell
sits-sets
Are there many verbs in English that seems to express the same idea?
Yes
