- •Lecture 3. The structural essence of typological investigations.
- •Objectives and tasks of the lecture:
- •The material for lecture3:
- •§3. To close up our discussion we shall distinguish the most characteristics of different language types:
- •§4. The distribution of languages as to their structural significance:
§3. To close up our discussion we shall distinguish the most characteristics of different language types:
Agglutinative type is characterized with the bound cases of agreement between the linguistic elements and monosyllabism. Instead of agreement we may observe here the combination of the elements according to adjoining type. These features are very distinctly are manifested in modern English, cf.: in all cases of relationships the two members of a structure retain their zero indexes – nice boy/ girl/ /cat/ boys / girls/ cats – adjoining, and only in a very few cases as these boys but this boy - partial agreement. Moreover, the word-stock of this language predominantly consists of the monosyllabic words which, in their linguistic status are determined as the root-morphemes – morphological level, and lexical units – lexicological level. Here seems quite reasonable to regard Modern English as language the grammatical tendency of which is analytical. In Ukrainian or Russian we also may see the monosyllabic words but the matter lies in a developed system of case inflections what is categorially not characteristic of the present-day English. In general: in agglutinative techniques the morphemes are formally and semantically separate but get united into the words. In fact, this position is realized differently for the form and for the meaning. So, formal agglutination lacks mutual phonetic penetration -fusion -between the morphemes ( sandkhi-сандхи), while semantic agglutination presupposes the expression of every semantic element –seme- by a separate morpheme. Accordingly, fusion may be formal as in Russian word детский [д’ецк’ий] and semantic (cumulation-кумуляция), as in Russian\Ukrainian inflection «у» in the words ‘столу’, ‘хлопчику’ are encoded simultaneously grammatical meanings ‘dative -дательный падеж’, ‘singular - единственное число’ and gender ‘masculine -мужской род’.
Inflected type is strictly discriminated from other types with the clearly expressed agreement of the components within a structure. The categories of gender, number, case and determination in languages of this type are presented explicitly. Agreement as the type of syntagmatic connection presupposes at least two morphemes structure, i.e. root-morpheme + affixed morpheme, as in Russian or Ukrainian вод + а, сел + о.
In isolating type of a language instead of agreement as the type of a syntagmatic connection we may distinguish adjoining, rigid word order in a sentence structure, the presence of prepositions and various particles to express relationships of the words in a sentence. The morphemes are arranged as distantly as possible. In this respect isolated languages de facto coincide with the analytical languages because the expression of grammatical meanings with the help of function words is practically the same. Also counts here the fact of maximal discrimination of morphemes. Though it is to remember that synthetic language may be both agglutinative and inflective.
For polysynthetic (incorporative) type of a language the presence of word-sentences or nominalized complexes is very characteristic, i.e. the discrimination between inflective and incorporative languages lies in the fact that the fusion of morphemes takes place on the level of a sentence, not a word.
