Related Research Articles
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.
An analytic language is a type of natural language concept of which a series of root/stem words are accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely, as opposed to synthetic languages which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by the word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase fēl-is pisc-em cēpit "the cat caught the fish" to fēl-em pisc-is cēpit "the fish caught the cat", the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.
In linguistic morphology, an uninflected word is a word that has no morphological markers (inflection) such as affixes, ablaut, consonant gradation, etc., indicating declension or conjugation. If a word has an uninflected form, this is usually the form used as the lemma for the word.
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba in West Africa and Vietnamese in Southeast Asia.
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-i-z-de-n. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.
The morphology of Irish is in some respects typical of an Indo-European language. Nouns are declined for number and case, and verbs for person and number. Nouns are classified by masculine or feminine gender. Other aspects of Irish morphology, while typical for an Insular Celtic language, are not typical for Indo-European, such as the presence of inflected prepositions and the initial consonant mutations. Irish syntax is also rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, due to its use of the verb–subject–object word order.
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as one word.
Greenlandic is an Eskimo–Aleut language with about 57,000 speakers, mostly Greenlandic Inuit in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada such as Inuktitut. It is the most widely spoken Eskimo–Aleut language. In June 2009, the government of Greenland, the Naalakkersuisut, made Greenlandic the sole official language of the autonomous territory, to strengthen it in the face of competition from the colonial language, Danish. The main variety is Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic. The second variety is Tunumiit oraasiat, or East Greenlandic. The language of the Inughuit of Greenland, Inuktun or Polar Eskimo, is a recent arrival and a dialect of Inuktitut.
Mbula is an Austronesian language spoken by around 2,500 people on Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
Wiyot or Soulatluk (lit. 'your jaw') is an Algic language spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962.
Onondaga language is the language of the Onondaga First Nation, one of the original five constituent tribes of the League of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee).
This article describes the grammar of Tigrinya, a South Semitic language which is spoken primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and is written in Ge'ez script.
Odia grammar is the study of the morphological and syntactic structures, word order, case inflections, verb conjugation and other grammatical structures of Odia, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.
Tundra Nenets is a Uralic language spoken in European Russia and North-Western Siberia. It is the largest and best-preserved language in the Samoyedic group.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 Dawson, Hope C.; Phelan, Michael, eds. (2016). Language Files (12 ed.). Ohio State University. pp. 172–175.
- ↑ Dawson, Hope C.; Phelan, Michael, eds. (2016). Language Files (12 ed.). Ohio State University. p. 156.
- 1 2 3 Sapir, Edward. "Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech" . Retrieved 9 December 2018.
- ↑ "Agglutinating language". Glottopedia. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
- ↑ "Fusional Language". Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-04. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
- ↑ Ellos, William J (1982). "Benjamin Lee Whorf and Ultimate Reality and Meaning". Ultimate Reality and Meaning. 5 (2): 140–150. doi: 10.3138/uram.5.2.140 .
- ↑ "synthetic language". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
- ↑ Haspelmath, M, & Michaelis, S. M. (2017). Analytic and synthetic. In Language Variation-European Perspectives VI: Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- ↑ Lupyan, Gary; Dale, Rick; O'Rourke, Dennis (20 January 2010). "Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure". PLOS ONE. 5 (1): e8559. Bibcode:2010PLoSO...5.8559L. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 . PMC 2798932 . PMID 20098492.
- ↑ See pp. 65-67 in Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2020), Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond , Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199812790 / ISBN 9780199812776
