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Linguistics

Notes The first example is a sentence of one word only, the second one contains two words. When we
compare this with the number of words in the English glosses (four and seven respectively), we get
some idea of what it means for a language to be polysynthetic.
The second scale on which we may rank languages as to their morphological properties is that of
fusion. In some languages, a word is easily segmentable into its constituent morphemes. An example
is Turkish, a language that is therefore characterized as agglutinative: the stem of a word is followed
by one or more suffixes, each with their own meaning:
(25) cocuk-lar-niz-dan
child-PL-YOUR.PL-ABL “from your children”
Most Indo-European languages are fusional in their inflectional system since different inflectional
properties are often expressed by one and the same morpheme. In the Polish word form koty “cat,
NOM.PL” the ending -y expresses simultaneously the properties NOMINATIVE and PLURAL. In
the English word walks, the ending -s expresses three properties: PRESENT TENSE, SINGULAR, and
3.PERSON. Such units that serve to express more than one morphological property are called
portmanteau morphs.
When a language tends to be more agglutinative, it will tend to have more morphemes per word
than a fusional language, and hence it will be higher on the scale of synthesis as well. The average
number of morphemes per word in Turkish is estimated to be four times higher than that in English
(Csat \ and Johanson 1998: 208).
The kind of typological classification discussed so far mainly has a descriptive and orientational
function: by locating a language on a number of scales, we know roughly what kind of morphological
system we may expect. But it does not provide fine-grained classifications. Germanic lan-guages are
fusional in their inflectional systems, but agglutinative in their system of derivational word-formation.
Moreover, for an adequate descriptive classification other parameters are also relevant, for instance
the parameter of reduplication: languages of the Austronesian family make wide use of reduplication
patterns, whereas this does not apply to most Indo-European languages of Europe. Languages may
also differ in the extent to which they make use of prefixation or suffixation.
Morphological typology becomes theoretically interesting if it enables us to predict certain properties
of a language on the basis of other properties. For instance, the following morphological universal
has been proposed by Greenberg(1963: 95):
(26) If a language has the category of Gender, it always has the category of Number.
This universal has the form of an implication, and hence it predicts that of the four following logically
possible languages only the first three exist:
(27) a. Languages with Gender and Number
b. Languages with Number only
c. Languages without Gender or Number
d. Languages with Gender only
Thus, an implicational universal is a restriction on the class of possible natural languages, and hence
contributes to the definition of the notion ‘possible natural language’.
Some implicational universals pertain to markedness phenomena. Markedness is the asymmetrical
distribution of properties. An example of a markedness universal is that there are many languages in
which the singular is not expressed by a morpheme, but only the plural, whereas there are no languages
where only the singular is expressed by a morpheme. For example, the asymmetric distributional pattern
of singular and plural morphemes given in Table 22.1 has been found. This table shows that languages
with a singular morpheme only must be excluded in order to restrict the degree of variation in natural
language. Hence, we might formulate the following implication universal for this markedness pattern:
‘if singular number is expressed by a morpheme, then plural number as well’.

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