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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 ...
In linguistics, morphology (mor-FOL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [2] [3] 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.
Surface forms of words are those found in natural language text. The corresponding lexical form of a surface form is the lemma followed by grammatical information (for example the part of speech, gender and number). In English give, gives, giving, gave and given are surface forms of the verb give. The lexical form would be "give", verb.
When a language becomes less synthetic, it is often a matter of morphological leveling. An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today (see also null morpheme ), thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin , in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense , aspect ...
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. [ 1 ]
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. [1] It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008.
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.
The following list is verbatim from the list printed in the appendix of Greenberg's Universals of Language [1] and "Universals Restated", [2] [3] sorted by context. The numbering is fixed to keep Greenberg's number associations as these are commonly referenced by number; e.g.: "Greenberg's linguistic universal number 12".