Classification

7 Key excerpts on "Classification"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics

  • Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik, Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  This chapter discusses methods of joining languages in groups based on (different degrees of) genealogical relatedness. This criterion is only one among many conceivable ones that may be used to classify languages. Other possible criteria include geography, evidence of language contact or the presence of certain typological features; but these types of criteria will be ignored here. The reason for the limited focus is not only lack of space, but also the special interest that genealogical Classification holds within and beyond the language sciences. If languages can be shown to be related genealogically it means that they share a common ancestor. This, in turn, means that something useful may be said about specific human groups in prehistory in some given region through the inspection of the current related languages. But language Classification is not only a tool for students of prehistory, it also serves to organize knowledge and direct research. For instance, if it can be shown that a given group of languages are related, then that group of languages may become a target for comparative research. Alternatively, if a given language turns out to lack relatives, then the language in question gains a position of special interest because of its uniqueness. Thus, language Classification is a natural preparatory step before the further in-depth study of languages.

  Two aspects of the present contribution set it somewhat apart from most textbook introductions to the topic. First, language Classification is treated not as sui generis, i.e. as a field confined to its own tradition, but rather as a subfield of general phylogenetics, a field which has traditionally been dominated by biology. Therefore, the terminology is often drawn from biology. Second, the focus is less on the state of the art and more on potential aspects of the future of the art.

  In terms of both goals and methods there are many differences between external and internal language Classification. By external Classification, I refer to the joining of genealogically related languages into maximally inclusive groups. Such maximally inclusive groups are henceforth called families. An example of a family would be Indo-European. Provided that there is sufficient evidence for a higher-level grouping, for instance some version of Nostratic, then this would also be a family, in my use of the term (the example is used for illustrating a terminological issue, and is not meant to imply anything about how I evaluate Nostratic). Germanic, however, never constitutes a family in my use of the term because this group of languages, as all would agree, is certainly related to some other languages. External language Classification has been pursued in many different ways, and a single, consistent method has yet to be applied to all the world’s languages. Typically, families have initially been suggested on the basis of certain striking similarities and for some suggestions consensus has eventually been reached that the relationship in question was real, whereas other suggestions have remained controversial to various degrees (see Campbell and Poser 2008: 404–415 for a comprehensive list of such proposals). The types of similarities have been either lexical or grammatical in nature, if not both, but regardless of the nature of such initial observations consensus concerning the existence of a true phylogeny has never been reached until scholars were able to reconstruct vocabulary and grammar, and to show regular trajectories in the development from a proto-language to its daughters. Such work requires years of dedicated effort applying the comparative method, so there is typically a leap between the initial proposal of a distant genealogical relationship and the acceptance of such a proposal. For instance, it took half a century between the initial proposal of Austroasiatic by Schmidt (1906) until scholars began to establish it more firmly (cf. Pinnow 1959 and papers in Zide 1966), and Sapir’s (1913) proposed relationship between Wiyot and Yurok and Algonquian was not generally accepted until the work of Haas (1958a).

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  Language, Culture, and Society

  An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

  • James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Language Through Time LEARNING OBJECTIVES •  Explain the various ways languages are classified. •  Name some of the features of language typology. •  Describe some of the regularities of sound changes. •  Describe some of the processes of vocabulary change. •  Be able to do reconstructions of some protolanguage forms.

  The structure of a language may be analyzed and described as it exists at some point in time, either in the present or the past. The approach that considers a language as though it had been sliced through time, ignoring historical antecedents, is referred to as synchronic linguistics. But it is also possible to study the historical development of a language by giving attention to the changes that occurred in the language over a period of time. Such an analysis or approach is diachronic, or historical, linguistics. This chapter shows some of the ways a diachronic approach can benefit anthropologists.

  HOW LANGUAGES ARE CLASSIFIED

  Anyone who knows Spanish will tell you that other languages, such as Portuguese or Italian, seem to be related to Spanish. This is due to their common origin from Latin. Traditionally, one of the most common activities in historical linguistics has been to classify languages according to these genetic relationships. It is difficult to give the exact number of languages spoken in the world at present, but the total undoubtedly approaches 6,000 (Krauss 1992:5–6), possibly 7,000. It is impossible to guess how many languages must have become extinct in prehistoric times. We do know that during the historical period for which we have written records, a great many languages have died out.

  Language Families

  A language family includes all those languages that are related by virtue of having descended from a single ancestral language. The concept of the language family is somewhat conservative: it is generally employed only if the relationship and the correspondences among the languages have been firmly established by careful comparative work and a convincing number of cognates. Subdivisions of a language family are usually referred to as branches. The Indo-European

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  On Latin Adverbs

  • Harm Pinkster(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  2. PROBLEMS OF Classification In this chapter I will discuss some general problems of Classification, viz. the purposes 'of Classification, the types of criteria on which a Classification can be based, the relation between these types and, finally, the relative importance of the criteria and the number of criteria required. 2.1. Purposes of Classification Linguistic items can be grouped into classes on account of certain characteristics they have in common. Word Classification, such as the Classification of adverbs, is a specific instance of this general problem. The purposes of such a Classification are to obtain a higher degree of generalization in the description of the specific language the linguist is working on, to make it more adequate since, while classifying, the linguist is forced to state explicitly which items are similar, and in what respects, which items are different, and what is the relation between the various classes to which the items are assigned. The description becomes simpler since identical or similar phenomena can be described together in one statement (Crystal 1967: 25-7; Van Wijk 1967: 235; Schopf 1963: 63). Classification should, of course, be based on a careful analysis of an adequate sample of material (cf. 1.1.). Once the linguist has reached a satisfactory Classification and has thereby left the stage of discovery he may incorporate the classes in the grammar. The way in which this incorporation is effected will be determined by the type of grammar the linguist has in mind. Traditionally the incorporation took the form of a more or less explicit defmition 1 , like Priscian's adverb 1 Explicit definition does not belong to the stage of discovery. See Robins (1966: 17-9; 1967b: 211-4) contra Bach (1964: 28-9). 17 18 Problems of Classification definition: 'the adverb is an invariable part of speech that modifies a verb' (cf. ch. 3).

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  Historical Linguistics

  An Introduction

  • Winfred P. Lehmann(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Typological Classification

  5.1 AIMS OF TYPOLOGICAL Classification

  Languages may be classified on a totally different basis from that used to determine genealogical relationship, that is, by attention to their type. In typological Classification, selected features may be used to sort out languages, or for that matter any items of human culture, such as tools or social systems, for example, those employed in kinship systems. Linguistic Classification by types has the advantage that a language of any period may be sorted into a specific group; languages attested only today can be so treated, as well as languages attested several millennia ago. Moreover, it has become clear that determination of types provides understanding of the structure of a given language. It is also obvious that such understanding is in accordance with the bases selected for typological Classification. Over the past three and more centuries different bases have been selected, and different procedures have been employed, with gradual improvement in methods and results.

  Identification of selected characteristics grew out of the attention to languages of the nonwestern world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As noted above, these reached their culmination in Adelung’s Mithridates (1806–16). When we examine its Classification, we note that it sorts languages into two types: monosyllabic and polysyllabic. Chinese is the first of the monosyllabic languages to be presented by Adelung; of the many polysyllabic languages we may compare his treatment of Turkish.

  For each, Adelung includes statements on phonology, as that Chinese has no final consonants other than nasals and that it has tones, while Turkish has many phonological elements and generally places the accent on the last syllable of words. Further, that Chinese is uninflected, while Turkish has six cases. Moreover, patterns of syntax are given, such as the Chinese comparative construction with modifier before the simple adjective (corresponding to Eng. more (accurate )) followed by the standard, and the Turkish construction with the ablative form of nouns before the simple adjective. However accurate many of these observations may be, Adelung’s Mithridates

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  267 7.3 The Typological Classification of Languages • The Sino-Austric hypothesis, which relates Chinese and Tibetan languages with Austroasiatic languages (including Vietnamese and Khmer), Austronesian languages (such as Filipino, Malagasy, and Hawaiian), as well as Thai and Hmong-Mien languages; and • The Borean hypothesis, which includes all of the above language families. 7.3 The Typological Classification of Languages Besides their genetic relatedness to other languages, languages can also be classified by their linguistic features. Since languages differ on many aspects at various levels – phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics – numerous typological Classifications have been devised. Below, we will consider three such Classifications that fall into the domains of morphology, syntax, and semantics. 7.3.1 Morphological Types The first typological Classification to be considered here involves the ways in which languages build words out of morphemes. There are three major types of languages with respect to the way their morphology operates: isolating, agglutinative, and fusional. In an isolating language (not to be confused with an isolate language), words typically consist of one or two morphemes, and grammatical meanings such as num- ber or tense are expressed not by affixes attached to nouns or verbs, but by separate words. An example of a language with (mostly) isolating morphology is Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, plurality is not expressed by an affix on the noun, but by a separate word. As you can see in example (4), Mandarin has marked plural with the (unbound) word ji 3 (note that the superscripted numbers indicate tones on the pre- ceding vowels). (4) In an additional twist, the presence of the plural word requires yet another word, called a classifier, which makes the noun itself countable. Classifiers are some- what like words such as grain in a grain of sand in English, which are sometimes called massifiers.

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  New Language Technologies and Research in Linguistics

  • Praful Dhondopant Kulkarni(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1) Phonetics, Phonology: This is the level of sounds. One must recognize here between the arrangement of conceivable human sounds, which constitutes the range of phonetics legitimate, and the arrangement of framework sounds utilized as a part of a given human dialect, which constitutes the region of phonology. Phonology is concerned about characterizing the hints of dialect and with saying how the subset utilized as a part of a specific dialect is used, for example what refinements in importance can be made on the premise of what sounds. 2) Morphology: This is the level of words and endings, to place it in streamlined terms. It is the thing that one typically comprehends by language structure (alongside sentence structure). The term morphology alludes to the examination of negligible structures in dialect which are, notwithstanding, themselves included sounds and which are utilized to develop words which have either a New Language Technologies and Research in Linguistics 44 linguistic or a lexical capacity. Lexicology is worried about the investigation of the vocabulary from a formal perspective and is in this way firmly connected to (derivational) morphology. 3) Syntax: This is the level of sentences. It is worried about the implications of words in mix with each other to frame expressions or sentences. Specifically, it includes contrasts in importance landed at by changes in word arrange, the expansion or subtraction of words from sentences or changes as sentences. It besides manages the relatedness of various sentence sorts and with the examination of equivocal sentences. Dialect typology endeavors to characterize dialects as indicated by high-arrange standards of morphology and syntax and to make sets of speculations crosswise over various dialects independent of their hereditary affiliations, i.e., of what dialect family they have a place with.

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  Diachronic, areal, and typological Linguistics

  • Henry M. Hoenigswald(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  A new interest was, however, given to structural, typological Classification; greater insights had been made into the nature of linguistic structure at all levels, and linguists now felt free to range beyond the Classifications of the previous century, which had dealt with only one or two rather obvious facets of grammatical organization, important and revealing as they had been. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say, with Stankiewicz (1966:495) that 'the development of modern linguistics is largely a history of oscillation between two complementary approaches to the comparison of languages, known respectively as the genetic, or reconstruc-tive, and the typological, or general linguistic approach'; but the revival of independent interest in the structural comparison and Classification of languages and the developments in the Classification procedures employed have been a notable characteristic of twentieth century linguistic work. Twentieth century typology was not only wider-ranging than hitherto; it came to be deliberately independent of historical and geographical implications (although, of course, the contingent coincidences of history, geography, and structure were recog-nized). Schmidt (1926) sharply distinguished between Sprachfamilien, resulting from genetic Classification, and Sprachenkreise, typological groupings based on some set or sets of shared features, perhaps correlating with wider Kulturkreise. The material evidence was different as between the two: for the former 'eine Untersuchung des Sprachmaterials im einzelnen, seiner einzelnen Wörter', for the latter 'eine Reihe 24 R. H. ROBINS besonders charakteristischer Sprachelemente' (1926:271).

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