Indo-European language system is marked by more or less elaborate

systems of inflections, one of the most complex of which appears to

have been exhibited by Proto-Indo-European. Most modern Indo-

European languages display both internal inflectional change and

external affixes, often simultaneously in a single word (as German

Männer from Mann or English sold from sell).

Extremely synthetic languages, where words are very complex and

sometimes constitute entire clauses, with extensive use of inflection,

derivation and compounding, are called polysynthetic (or incorporating).

This category for classifying languages was proposed in 1836 by William

Humbotdt. A polysynthetic language is one in which objects, indirect objects,

and other sentence elements are incorporated into the verb as one word.

Swahili does this, as in hatukuviwanunulia, which means “We did not buy

them (= things) for them (= people).” The components of this word are ha

(negative), tu (“we”), ku (indicator of past), vi (“them,” meaning “objects”),

wa (“them,” meaning “people”), and nunulia (“buy for”). Polysynthetic

languages are primarily found among Eskimo and American Indian

languages, as well as a few languages in Siberia, Northern Caucasus and

Australia.

Theoretically speaking, languages may locate themselves at any

point on the scale from analytic to polysynthetic:

Analytic

Synthetic

Polysynthetic

(word = orpheme) (word > morpheme) (word = clause)

There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether

morphemes are clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are

agglutinative and fusional (or inflectional or flectional in older

terminology).Thus, synthetic and polysynthetic languages may be

further subdivided into agglutinative and flectional languages.

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In the ideal case, an agglutinative language (from the Latin for “to

glue to”) is a synthetic or a polysynthetic language in which words are

composed of roots, and one or more affixes (prefixes at the beginning,

infixes in the middle, and suffixes at the end of words) with distinct

meanings. The essential feature of agglutinative languages is that affixes

are characterised by a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and

form and have distinst boundaries. An example is Turkish, which has äv

(“house”), ä-vdä (“in the house”), äv-lär (“houses”), and äv-lär-da (“in

the houses”).

In an almost ideal case like Turkish, agglutinative languages exhibit

all of the following two properties, while flectional languages exhibit

the opposite properties:

1. Each morpheme expresses only one meaning element. This is the

opposite of cumulation, typical of flectional languages, where each

morpheme expresses more than one meaning element, such as in

modern Greek raf-ete ‘was being written’, where the suffix -ete

expresses five different meaning elements: 3 rd person, singular, passive

voice, durative and past tense (the same is observed in Ukrainian).

2. There is a clear-cut boundary between each morpheme. The

opposite is known as fusion. In fusional (flectional) languages, the basic

and added parts have merged, as a result of phonological processes.

Characteristic of inflection are internal word changes, such as English

ring, rang, rung, and the use of affixes that are fused to their roots,

having no independent existence or meaning, such as ід-е, ід-уть). On

the contrary, the affixes of agglutinative languages tend to be more

independent than the affixes of flective languages. For instance, the

Turkish plural suffix -lar (or -ler) sometimes applies not only to single

words, but to whole phrases: bayan ve bay-lar (‘ladies and gentlemen’).

The distinction between such affixes and separate function words is not

always easy to draw.

Historically, flective morphology is usually derrived from

agglutinative morphology, which in turn is derrived from the analytic

use of function words:

analytic agglutinative flectional

This does not mean, however, that analytic languages are more

“primitive” than flectional languages. In fact, many Indo-European

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languages, including English, have long been in the process of

becoming more analytic, discarding most of the complex flective

morphology of earlier historical stages.

Thus the existing morphological types of languages can be briefly

described in the following way:

1. Analytic languages show a low ratio of words to morphemes; in

fact, the correspondence is nearly one-to-one. Sentences in analytic

languages are composed of independent root morphemes. Grammatical

relations between words are expressed by separate words where they

might otherwise be expressed by affixes, which are present to a minimal

degree in such languages. There is little to no morphological change in

words: they tend to be uninflected. Grammatical categories are indicated

by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for

interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example,

a word for “some” or “many” instead of a plural inflection like English -

s). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are

expressed by other words. Finally, in analytic languages context and

syntax are more important than morphology. Highly analytic languages

are primarily found in East and Southeast Asia (e.g. Chinese,

Vietnamese), as well as West Africa and South Africa. English is

moderately analytic (probably one of the most analytic of Indo-

European languages).

2. Agglutinative languages have words containing several

morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one other 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 highly regular. Agglutinative languages

include Korean, Turkish and Japanese.

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. Most Indo-European languages

are fusional to a varying degree.

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3. Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of

dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. The morphemes may be

distinguishable from the root, or they may not. They may be fused with

it or among themselves (in that multiple pieces of grammatical

information may potentially be packed into one morpheme). Word order

is less important for these languages than it is for analytic languages,

since individual words express the grammatical relations that would

otherwise be indicated by syntax. In addition, there tends to be a high

degree of concordance (agreement, or cross-reference between different

parts of the sentence). Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is

more important than syntax. Most Indo-European languages are

moderately synthetic.

4. Polysynthetic 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”. Many Amerindian languages are

polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one example, and one specific example is the

phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit which roughly translates to “Do you have any

tobacco for sale?”. No clear division exists between synthetic languages

and polysynthetic languages; the place of one language largely depends

on its relation to other languages displaying similar characteristics on

the same scale.

Each of the types above are idealizations; they do not exist in a pure state

in reality. Although they generally fit best into one category, all languages are

mixed types. English is less analytic than Chinese, but it is more analytic than

Spanish, and much more analytic than Latin. Chinese is the usual model of

analytic languages, but it does have some bound morphemes. Japanese is

highly synthetic (agglutinative) in its verbs, but clearly analytic in its nouns.

For these reasons, the scale above is continuous and relative, not absolute. It

is difficult to classify a language as absolutely analytic or synthetic, as a

language could be described as more synthetic than Chinese, but less

synthetic than Korean.

That is why recent morphological typology is based on the

traditional typology, but instead of distinguishing four distinct language

types it operates with two independent variables, index of synthesis and

index of fusion (B.Comrie, L.J. Whaley). Index of synthesis (IS) refers

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to the amount of affixation in a language, i.e., it shows the average

number of morphemes per word in a language. It can be illustrated by

means of a scale, the end points of which are an isolating language and a

(poly)synthetic languages:

Isolating ______________________________________Synthetic

Each language falls on a given point on the scale. The languages in

which synthesis dominates are on the right side and those with weak

morphology on the left side on the scale.

Index of fusion (IF) refers to the ease with which morphemes can be

separated from other morphemes in a word. Agglutinative languages

have a low index of fusion, while in fusional languages it is high. In

agglutinative words segmentation can be performed readily due to clear

morpheme boundaries. In fusional words segmentation is difficult or

impossible. Index of fusion also can be illustrated by means of a scale.

The extremes are now agglutinative and fusional languages.

Agglutinative Fusional

All languages except for isolating languages fall between the two

extremes. In isolating languages, by definition, there are no

agglutinative or fusional morphological processes. Table 1 presents the

index of synthesis for eight languages. For each case, the figures are

calculated on the basis of 100 words of an unrestricted text sample.

Vietnamese is close to an ideal isolating language and its index of

synthesis is close to 1.0. Eskimo is a highly polysynthetic language, its

index of synthesis being high. The other sample languages fall between

Vietnamese and Eskimo.

Table 1

Language Index of synthesis

Vietnamese 1.06

English 1.09

Old English 1.68

Swahili 2.55

Turkish 2.86

Russian 3.33

Eskimo 3.72

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In the world’s languages, the most usual inflectional categories of

nouns are number, grammatical case, and grammatical gender. These

are the main morphological phenomena that affect the indices of

inflectional synthesis and fusion.

Table 2 shows the number of morphosyntactic features in the

category of case for 8 languages: Hungarian has 21 features. In English

there are only 2 features (nominative and genitive; genitive is marked).

Finnish represents a language with a high index of synthesis. This is

due, in particular, to the high number of morphosyntactic features in the

category of case (14 features). Because different affix types can be

combined with one another in a single word, the number of word forms

that a given Finnish lexeme may take is very high. The concept of

grammatical case is not relevant to all languages, it is alien to isolating

languages.

Table 2

Language Number of features in case

English 2

Finnish 14

German 4

Hungarian 21

Lithuanian 7

Russian 6

Sanskrit 8

Serbo-Croation 7

Thus, according to the existing morphological classifications, the

English language may be defined as a slightly synthetic fusional

language developing towards the highly isolating (analytic) type like

Chinese while the Ukrainian language may be characterised as a

predominantly synthetic fusional language.

Modern English shares the following typical features of analytic

languages:

1. Predominantly monosyllabic morphemes (and sometimes words).

2. Conversion (a word may shift part of speech with no change of

form).

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2. Extensive use of tonemes (the functional load carried by word

length in many synthetic languages tends to be carried by tonemes in

analytic languages).

3. Extensive use of function words.

4. Relatively fixed word order. (In a language without inflection,

function words and fixed word order carry some of the information that

is taken care of by inflection in synthetic languages).

5. Less rigid grammatical rules. As an example of a language with

less rigid grammatical rules, consider the following facts about Chinese:

• It has no inflection.

• Subject and object are often optional.

• Function words are often optional.

• Word boundaries and sentence boundaries are fuzzy.

• Apart from the noun-verb distinction, word class distinctions are

fuzzy.

A mildly synthetic language like English is much more rigid than

Chinese: a speaker of English is constantly forced to decide whether he

wants to talk about objects in the singular or the plural, and whether he

wants to talk about events in the present or the past. The same type of

rigidity lies behind the obligatory presence in many modern European

languages of a subject. Even in sentences with no logical subject, a

formal subject is required, such as in the English sentence It rains. This

is different from Chinese, which has neither obligatory subject nor verb

inflection.

Syntactic classifications. In addition to morphological properties,

languages differ from each other in syntactic features. In the syntactic

typology of Greenberg languages are divided into different types

according to so called basic word order, often understood as the order of

subject (S), object (O) and verb (V) in a typical declarative sentence

with a transitive verb. This is one of the most commonly discussed

typological distinctions in modern linguistics. The vast majority of the

languages of the world fall into one of three groups:

SOV (Japanese, Turkish etc.)

SVO ( Chinese, English etc.)

VSO (Arabic, Welsh etc.)

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Logically speaking, there should be nothing wrong with the three other

possibilities: VOS, OVS and OSV. However, they are exceedingly rare

and typically occur in areas that have been relatively isolated. Less than five

percent of the world’s languages belong to one of the three remaining

possible types: VOS, OVS and OSV. In other words, the subject precedes

the object in more than 95 percent of all languages. In fact, the subject tends

very strongly to precede both the verb and the object, and according to one

study, SOV and SVO together are found in more than 85 percent of all

languages, while VSO is only found in around 9 percent. Other studies give

different figures, but the tendency is the same. So the most common types

are SVO and SOV languages. In addition to sentence structure, the structure

of syntactic phrases may vary between languages. In English NPs (noun

phrases) are of the type AN (adjective, noun) while in French NPs are

predominantly of the type NA.

Other languages, such as Latin and Finnish, have no fixed word

order; rather, the sentence structure is flexible. Nonetheless, there is

often a preferred word order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside

of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent. In languages with

this kind of flexible word order, the order of words in given sentence

does not reliably indicate a noun’s grammatical role, so nouns typically

change their form to indicate their role (which is known as case

declension).