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In a synthetic language (Latin, Arabic, Finnish) the concepts cluster more thickly, the words are more richly chambered, but there is a tendency, on the whole, to keep the range of concrete significance in the single word down to a moderate compass. A polysynthetic language, as its name implies, is more than ordinarily synthetic.
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.
A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationships between words via inflection or agglutination, with fusional languages favoring the former and agglutinative languages the latter subtype of word synthesis.
A polysynthetic language is one in which multiple morphemes, including affixes, are often present within a single word. Each word can therefore express the meaning of a full clause or phrase; this structure has implications on how noun incorporation is manifested in the languages in which it is observed.
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 [1] in West Africa and Vietnamese [2] [3] (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia.
Agglutinative languages are a subset of synthetic languages. Within this category, they are distinguished from fusional languages, where morphemes often blend or change form to express multiple grammatical functions, and from polysynthetic languages, which can combine numerous morphemes into single words with complex meanings. Examples of ...
He asserts that the polysynthetic languages must conform to a syntactic rule he calls the "polysynthesis parameter", and that as a result will show a special set of syntactic properties. Following this parameter, one property of polysynthetic languages is non-rigid phrase structure, making these languages non-configurational.
In linguistic typology, active–stative alignment (also split intransitive alignment or semantic alignment) is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the sole argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause (often symbolized as S) is sometimes marked in the same way as an agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject such as "I" or "she" in English) but other times in the same way ...