Morphological typology

Polish noun declension collapses several factors into one ending: number (only plural is shown), gender, animacy, and case.

Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from the root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into one affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by internal phonological changes in the root (i.e. morphophonology), such as consonant gradation and vowel gradation, or by suprasegmental features such as stress or tone, which are of course inseparable from the root.

The Indo-European and Semitic languages are the most typically cited examples of fusional languages.[1] However, others have been described. For example, Navajo is sometimes categorized as a fusional language because its complex system of verbal affixes has become condensed and irregular enough that discerning individual morphemes is rarely possible.[2][3] Some Uralic languages are described as fusional, particularly the Sami languages and Estonian. On the other hand, not all Indo-European languages are fusional; for example, English and Afrikaans, as well as some North Germanic languages lean more toward the analytic.

A plaque in Chechen, an agglutinative language.

Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be individually identified. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high number of morphemes per word, and their morphology is usually highly regular, with a notable exception being Georgian, among others.

Agglutinative languages include Hungarian, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese, Swahili, Zulu and Indonesian.

In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a third category for classifying languages, a category that he labeled polysynthetic. (The term polysynthesis was first used in linguistics by Peter Stephen DuPonceau who borrowed it from chemistry.) These languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, a highly regular morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include morphemes that refer to several arguments besides the subject (polypersonalism). Another feature of polysynthetic languages is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that are equivalent to whole sentences in other languages". The distinction between synthetic languages and polysynthetic languages is therefore relative: the place of one language largely depends on its relation to other languages displaying similar characteristics on the same scale.

Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic; indeed, most of the world's polysynthetic languages are native to North America.[4] Inuktitut is one example, for instance the word-phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit roughly translates to "Do you have any tobacco for sale?". However, it is a common misconception that polysynthetic morphology is universal among Amerindian languages. Chinook and Shoshone, for instance, are simply agglutinative, as their nouns stand mostly separate from their verbs.[1]

Oligosynthetic languages are ones in which very few morphemes, perhaps only a few hundred, combine as in polysynthetic languages. Benjamin Whorf categorized Nahuatl and Blackfoot as oligosynthetic, but most linguists disagree with this classification and instead label them polysynthetic or simply agglutinative. No known languages are widely accepted as oligosynthetic.

A clock face has been used as a metaphor for the evolution amongst analytic, agglutinative and fusional states

R. M. W. Dixon (1998) theorizes that languages normally evolve in a cycle from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again. He analogizes this cycle to a clock, placing fusional languages at 12:00, analytic languages at 4:00, and agglutinative languages at 8:00. Dixon suggests that, for example, Old Chinese was at about 3:00 (mostly analytic with some fusional elements), while modern varieties are around 5:00 (leaning instead toward agglutination), and also guesses that Proto-Tai-Kadai may have been fusional. On the other hand, he argues that modern Finno-Ugric and Dravidian languages are on the transition from agglutinative to fusional, with the Finno-Ugric family being further along. Dixon cites the Egyptian language as one that has undergone the entire cycle in three thousand years.[10]

Other linguists have proposed similar concepts. For instance, Elly van Gelderen sees the regular patterns of linguistic change as a cycle. In the unidirectional cycles, older features are replaced by newer items. One example is grammaticalization, where a lexical item became a grammatical marker. The markers may further grammaticalize, and a new marker may come in place to substitute the loss of meaning of the previous marker.[11][12]

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) sees the categorization of languages as strictly analytic, agglutinative, or fusional as misleading, arguing that these categories conflate multiple variables. WALS lists these variables as:

• Phonological fusion – how intrinsically connected grammatical markers are phonologically to their host words[13]
• Formative exponence – the number of categories expressed in a single marker (e.g., tense + number + gender for verbs in some languages)[14]
• Flexivity – allomorphy and inflectional classes such as possessive classification[15]

These categories allow to capture non-traditional distributions of typological traits. For example, high exponence for nouns (e.g., case + number) is typically thought of as a trait of fusional languages. However, it is absent in many traditionally fusional languages like Arabic but present in many traditionally agglutinative languages like Finnish, Yaqui, and Cree.[14]