Languages & Linguistics
Agglutinating Languages
Agglutinating languages are a type of language where words are formed by combining morphemes, each of which represents a distinct meaning. These morphemes are added to the root word, which remains unchanged. Examples of agglutinating languages include Turkish, Finnish, and Swahili.
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No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- University Publications(Publisher)
Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, too, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage. Examples of agglutinative languages Examples of agglutinative languages include the Finno-Ugric languages, such as Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes. For example, the Finnish word talossanikin means in my house, too. Derivation can also be quite complex. For example, Finnish epäjärjestelmällisyys has the root järki logos, and consists of negative-logos-causative-frequentative-nominalizer-adessive-related to-property, and means the property of being unsystematic, unsystematicalness. The word has lots of stem changes, so Finnish is not the best example of an agglutinative language. Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost all and any part of it. The suffixes follow each other in special order, and can be heaped in extreme amount, resulting words conveying complex meanings in very compact form. An example is fiaiéi where the root fi- means son, the subsequent 4 vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means properties of the property of his/her sons. The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders). Agglutination is used very heavily in some Native American languages, such as Nahuatl, Quechua, Tz'utujil, Kaqchikel, Cha'palaachi and K'iche, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence in other languages.
eBook - PDFLanguage
Its Structure and Use
- Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Turkish (an Altaic language) and Swahili and Gikuyu (both Bantu languages) illustrate agglutinating morphology, as in the following ex-amples. (Hyphens represent morpheme boundaries within a word.) Turkish (an Altaic language) herkes ben üniversite-ye bašla-yacaǧ-ɨm san-ɨyor everyone I university-to start-fu ture-I believe-pr esent ‘Everyone believes that I will start university.’ Swahili (a Bantu language of eastern Africa) h-a-fany-I a-si-fany-e neg-h e-do-pr es he-n eg-do-subjunc ‘s/he isn’t doing (it)’ ‘s/he shouldn’t do (it)’ a-me-fanya a-ta-fanya he-p erf-do he-fut-do ‘s/he has done (it)’ ‘s/he will do (it)’ a-fany-e h-a-ta-fanya he-do-subjunc neg-h e-fut-do ‘s/he should do (it)’ ‘s/he won’t do (it)’ Gikuyu (a Bantu language of Kenya) ĩ-ngĩ-ka-na-endia i-hypothetical-future-indefinite time-s ell ‘if I should ever sell (it)’ Inflectional Morphology Many languages have large inventories of inflectional morphemes. Finnish, Russian, and German maintain elaborate inflectional systems. By contrast, over Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 56 Chapter 2 Words and Their Parts: Lexicon and Morphology the centuries English has shed most of its inflections, until today it has only eight remaining ones—two on nouns, four on verbs, and two on adjectives, as shown in Table 2.3. When new nouns, verbs, and adjectives are added to English or when a child learns new words, the words are extremely likely to be inflected like the examples listed, and the eight inflectional morphemes of English are thus said to be productive .
eBook - PDFIntroducing Linguistics
Theoretical and Applied Approaches
- Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Similarly, Proto-Australian (the ancestor of various aboriginal Australian languages) is reconstructed as mostly agglutinative with elements of isolating morphology. However, its descendants in the Pama-Nyungan family have turned into purely agglutinative or mostly agglutinative languages with elements of fusional morphology. The non-Pama-Nyungan descend- ants of Proto-Australian have moved even further down the path towards fusional languages. Finno-Ugric languages have also moved from a mostly agglutinative to a mostly fusional model. Why do languages change in terms of their morphological type? Simply put, it is because no morphological type is perfect. In an agglutinative language, words end up being very long since they are composed of multiple morphemes which each express a single grammatical meaning. Because of a universal linguistic tendency to contract (which produces such English words as I’d, he’ll, and aren’t), over time grammatical morphemes that frequently find themselves next to each other in an agglutinative for- mation start to rub and wear against each other, gradually fusing together. For example, recall from our discussion above that Tatar is mostly an agglutinative language where case is marked through suffixes that attach to noun roots. Specifically, the dative case suffix is –ga, as in bala–ga “to {a/the} child”. The same dative suffix can be seen in some pronominal forms, such as bez–gä “to us” (from bez “we”) and sez–gä “to you (plural)” (from sez “you (plural)”). The change from the back vowel in –ga to the front vowel in –gä is due to vowel harmony, which applies across affixes in the language, and is therefore irrelevant to us here. But in other pronominal forms, for example in the first and second person singular, the /g/ of the suffix fuses with the final /n/ of the pronoun root, producing a velar nasal [ŋ] as in (23).
eBook - PDF- Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
In an “ideal” morphological system each morpheme contributes one meaning and each meaning is associated with just one morpheme (“one form – one func- tion”). Such a morphological ideal is often called agglutination (and morpho- logists still sometimes speak of “agglutinating” languages where this type of morphology predominates). It should be obvious that this approach is at odds with the lexeme con- cept: the plural form cats would not, after all, be a word form belonging to an abstract lexeme, cat, rather it would be a compound form, in which the meaning of the suffix (or perhaps we should say the head of the compound?), plural, is grammaticalized. Where inflection is concerned this has proved impossible to maintain, for three main reasons. First, it is not always possible to identify a single segmentable morph for the putative morpheme; for instance, where is the plural morpheme in men (see section 2.2.2)? Second, there are significant deviations from the form-meaning pairing in affixation and these undermine the assumption that inflections are signs. Third, for such a theory to work we must be able to explain in a satisfactory way how complex words are constructed, and in particular how the morphemes get strung out in the right order. For complex inflectional systems this turns out to be very tricky. 2.2 Deviations from agglutination The “ideal” type of morphology, then, is often seen as the addition of a semant- ically transparent affix to a base, so-called concatenative morphology. There are several ways in which morphological systems present deviations from the agglutinating ideal of one form – one function. The first of these is caused by the fact that a given morpheme may have more than one shape (allomorphy). Beyond this, we find that there are operations which can’t easily be analyzed as the addition of a meaningful element but rather take the form of a phono- logical process, often called non-concatenative morphology. Languages abound
eBook - PDFProductivity and Creativity
Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck
- Mark Janse(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This phase is called cliticization and the resultant phrase is a phonological word. Cliticization may in its turn lead to the agglutination of the focal word and the clitic, especially if there is a syntactic relationship between the former and the latter. 5 This phase is called morphologization: the erstwhile analytic syntactic construction is turned into a synthetic morphological configuration. The focal word and the clitic are reanalyzed as a single word con-sisting of a root and an inflection. Agglutination may result in fusion 522 Mark Janse through morphonological processes and further phonological reduc-tion which may ultimately lead to the total loss of the inflection. This admittedly sketchy account of the grammaticalization process can be represented as follows (cf. Givon 1979: 209): ( 2 ) discourse —> syntax —» morphology —» morphonology -» 0 The corresponding phases of the grammaticalization process are as follows (cf. Lehmann 1995: 13): ( 3 ) syntacticization —» cliticization —> agglutination —» fusion —> loss Traditionally, grammaticalization has been associated with a shift from one type of language to another. In the classic Humboldtian typology, the word stage would correspond to the isolating type, the clitic-to-agglutinative stage to the agglutinative type, and the agglu-tinative-to-fusional stage to the fusional type (cf. Comrie 1989: 4.2). Since grammaticalization is generally considered a cyclic process, 6 the distinctions are bound to be fuzzy: a fusional language may develop new discourse strategies which may be syntacticized etc. In short, today's morphology may well be yesterday's syntax, but what about yesterday's morphology and the day before yesterday's syntax? So far grammaticalization has been viewed exclusively from a diachronic perspective, as a series of linguistic changes along a particular cline.
eBook - PDFPathways to Language
From Fetus to Adolescent
- Kyra Karmiloff, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Kyra KARMILOFF(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
5 b e c o m i n g a g r a m m a t i c a l b e i n g Language is infinitely creative, yet this creativity does not really stem from the number of words we have in our vocabu-lary. Rather, it is how we combine words grammatically that allows us to share every new thought, feeling, or experience. But first, what is grammar? Defined most simply, grammar refers to the set of rela-tionships that structure language. The term includes both morphol-ogy and syntax (and is therefore sometimes referred to as the morphosyntax of language). Morphology involves the analysis of structure at the word level. It focuses on how morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) are organized and combined to form words and alter meaning in different linguistic contexts. In English, for instance, morphemes include suffixes (for example, plural “s” as in “dogs,” past-tense “ed” as in “walked”), and prefixes (“un” as in “undo,” “para” as in “paramilitary”). These are called bound morphemes because they are attached to the words that they modify. Although these bound morphemes represent only very small parts of words, their addition or omission can completely transform the meaning of sentences. Some languages, like Tagalog, also have what are known as infixes. These morphemes occur within words, rather than at the beginning or end, and also alter meaning. Suffixes, prefixes, and infixes are collectively known as affixes. In contrast to bound morphemes, unbound morphemes stand alone within sen-tences. They are not parts of words, but rather whole words, and in-clude not only nouns and verbs that have no extra morphemes at-tached to them (like “dog” and “go” without the addition of plural or tense markers), but also function words, which alter meaning in similar ways to the bound morphemes.
- Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
1.5.1.2. Agglutination and the creation of new lexical items. Agglutina-tion is productive as a word formation process in Latin – sometimes as a substitute for certain compound structures that Latin had not developed – as well as in the other Indo-European languages. 34 In Latin, agglutination created many non-inflected terms (adverbs in the widest meaning of the term, including prepositions, particles, connectors, and subordinating conjunctions), as well as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as illustrated by the following examples: – verbs: animum aduertere > anim-aduertere , u¯ en-¯ ıre ‘to be on sale’ ( < u¯ enum ¯ ıre ) and u¯ en-dere ‘to sell’ ( < u¯ enum dare ), necesse est ‘it is neces-sary to’, nequ¯ ıre ‘not to be able to’, man¯ u mittere (man¯ u-mittere) ; – nouns: agr¯ ı cult¯ ura > agr¯ ı-cult¯ ura , r¯ es p¯ ublica , sen¯ atus-consultum , ¯ usus-fructus , i¯ us i¯ urandum and the lexeme form of the vocative and nominative singular I¯ upiter ( < *I¯ u pater ); – adjectives: u¯ er¯ ı-similis , ob-ui-us (from the adverb ob-uiam < ob uiam ); – adverbs: s¯ edul¯ o < *s¯ e dol¯ o , pr¯ o-fect¯ o < *pr¯ o fact¯ o , ho-di¯ e , mer¯ ı-di¯ e , postr¯ ı-di¯ e ; inter-e¯ a , per-inde ; e¯ o-mod¯ o , magn-opere ; – subordinating conjunctions: qu¯ o-modo , qu¯ a-r¯ e , quam-ob-rem . As is shown by quasi ‘as if’ (for a counterfactual event), formed by the agglutination of qua(m) and s¯ ı , a subordinator that usually introduces a verbal syntagm may also introduce a nominal syntagm (which is a downgrading), and especially an adjective in Late Latin (Apul. apol . 4,13: crimen quod illi quasi capitale intenderunt ). – numerals: ¯ un-decim ‘eleven’, duo-decim ‘twelve’, tr¯ e-decim ‘thirteen’, duo-d¯ e-u¯ ıgint¯ ı ‘eighteen’, ¯ un-d¯ e-u¯ ıgint¯ ı ‘nineteen’ . 34. Fruyt (1990, 2005a). This productivity has been inherited by the Romance languages.
eBook - PDFA Grammar of Shaowu
A Sinitic Language of Northwestern Fujian
- Sing Sing Ngai(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512483-008 Chapter 6 Affixal morphology Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and deals with two main issues: the definition of ‘the smallest meaningful unit’ in a linguistic system and related processes involved, including derivation, reduplication, compound-ing and inflection (Bybee 1985, Dixon & Aikhenvald 2007: 1–41, Matthews 1991, Packard 1997: 1–43, Shao et al. 2003, Xu 2012b, inter alia ). It has been a long- lasting linguistic debate on whether or not Sinitic languages have developed mor-phology. If we compare Sinitic languages, including Shaowu, with inflectional languages, such as Greek, or agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, there is indeed virtually no inflectional morphology. However, there are extensive deriva-tional affixation, reduplication and compounding processes. Reduplication and compounding are very well-developed in Sinitic (see e.g., Chappell 2001a: 5, 2015: 14; Tsao 2001). Reduplication of verbs in Sinitic, such as in some Wu languages and dialects, can take on an array of functions from delimitative, to tentative, to durative and even perfective aspects (see, e.g., Liu, in preparation). In addition to the three word-formation processes mentioned above, Sinitic also uses the ‘zero-morpheme’ strategy for a shift in word classes, which operates on a semantic level to allow a shift of grammatical category without changing the surface form (e.g., in English: ‘a market’ vs ‘to market’). Such transcategoriality does not mean that Sinitic lacks parts of speech. Indeed, various diagnostic tests such as aspect marking, negation, syntactic distribution can be carried out to determine the part of speech a given word form belongs to in a given context. Sinitic languages have a large inventory of word forms that each belong to more than one word-class.
eBook - PDF- A. H. Sayce(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Here, at any rate, we can discover a common origin, a common descent for the manifold branches of the human family. 368 THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE . SchlegeFs attempt to divide languages morphologi cally has already been described. He distinguished them primarily as inorganic and organic, the first class includ ing languages “ with grammatical structure/’ like the Chinese or languages with affixes, and the second class, including the synthetic or ancient and analytic or modern dialects of the inflectional tongues. Pott, following Wil helm von Humboldt, established the division which with various modifications is still upheld by most linguistic students. According to this the languages of the world fall into four groups, the polysynthetic (such as the Eskimaux or the Mexican), the isolating (like the Chinese), the agglutinative (like the Turkish), and the inflectional (like Sanskrit). The first group he terms transnormal, the second two intra-normal, and the third alone normal. Bopp falls back upon Schlegel’s classifi cation, making but three kinds of speech, the isolating with monosyllabic roots but “ without organism, without grammar; ” the languages capable of composition, of which the Indo-European form the highest type ; and the Semitic languages which denote the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change. Schleicher, like Max Muller, discards the first or polysynthetic class of Humboldt and Pott, while Max Muller acutely seeks historical support for the threefold division by referring the isolating languages to races which have not risen above family-life, the agglutinative to nomad tribes, and the inflectional to peoples who have arrived at the con ception of the state. All these divisions, so far as they are founded in fact, are really based, not on the word, but on the sentence,
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