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Classifying Languages into Types
The genetic and typological classifications are two ways of classifying languages into types. With genetic classifications, linguists simply examine early remains of a particular language or make deductions so as to reconstruct the form of the parent language. With the typological classification, languages are grouped together into structural types based on the similarities that exist between them at different levels of linguistic analysis. Unlike the genetic classification type, this method does not consider historical relationship, which may exist among languages.
Languages can also be classified with respect to their word order, that is, if they are fixed or not and which order is preferred.
Genetically, English is a Germanic language. Ordinarily, however, the language displays characteristics peculiar to languages in other groups. From a typological viewpoint, English is more similar to an isolating language while having some characteristics of agglutinating and synthetic languages.
Analytic/isolating languages are those languages which have their lexes being free and not fused as the case may be. Examples of such isolating languages include Chinese and Vietnamese. With agglutinating languages, lexes are made up of morphemes brought together with these morphemes being separable.
Almost all languages have this characteristic of agglutinating. Yoruba’s onile and alata could be broken into: Onile ------------- oni + ile (owner of house) Alata ------------- oni + ata (seller of pepper) Japanese, Swahili, and Turkish are examples of agglutinating language types. Words in these languages are made up of long sequences of units with each expressing a clean grammatical meaning. Synthetic/inflecting languages have their lexes being made up of fused morphemes – those which cannot be easily broken into parts. Went and mice (from go + ed) and (mouse + s) are examples of inflection.
With the Eskimo, Mohawk, and Australian languages, words are often very long and complex. The English language, from our previous discussion of morphemes in the language, is basically analytical. That is, have most of its lexes being made of free morphemes. Words here have meaning in isolation and do not have to be dependent on some other forms to be meaningful. Examples include table, girl, she, go, church, etc.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
State two parameters that you can use to classify languages.
Lexical Types
Agglutinating Type
English could either be agglutinating or semi-agglutinating. The agglutinating features of the language could be seen in compound words where two morphemes of isolating language types come together to form an entirely new lexical item in the language. Examples are greenhouse, schoolboy, and playboy. The overall meaning of the newly formed compound word does not often depend on our understanding of the individual morphemes that make up the compound. The item playboy, for instance, does not really refer to a teenager but an adult. Compound words therefore have to be learnt, as we will do new words.
Semi-agglutinating Type
With semi-agglutinating, we really do not have free morphemes coming together to make a word but a case of a free + bound. An example of semi-agglutinating in English is seen in the morph (-er), which is found in the comparative forms of adjectives (longer and slower) and in ‘agent’ nouns formed from verbs (i.e. teacher and farmer).
Synthetic/Inflecting Type
Synthetic/inflecting forms could either be partial or full depending on if they are partly or wholly indeterminate with respect to segmentation. Semi-inflection could be seen in goes and washes while inflecting the forms of the verbs for the third person singular. There are few instances of full inflection. The comparative forms better and worse could be very difficult to segment. These are instances of full inflection. One other example of full inflection is the third person singular of the verb, to be. The form is might be segmented into [i] an allomorph of be if we assume that the [s] in is is merely the present tense singular marker. However, it will be meaningless to analyze it thus since [i] occurs nowhere else as an allomorph of be.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Identify and explain three lexical types that you have come across in the course.
CONCLUSION
Generally, we could conclude that the language has a reasonable number of its lexes being isolating because many English words have no internal grammatical structures. We could equally rightly say that some of the words are agglutinating because they are complex but more loosely knit with categories not being so closely associated with the words individually. We will also be right to say that the English language displays properties of inflecting languages where it has some of its words being centrally tightly knit together and often of complex units carrying in themselves many of the basic grammatical categories.
SUMMARY
In this unit, you have studied the following: • parameters for classifying languages • lexical types with examples
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