Week 7: Morphological typology and glossing
LEL2D Morphosyntax
Inflectional morphology
We’re getting started with some aspects of morphological typology. The text I’m mostly relying on this week is Bickel and Nichols (2007), a fairly long book chapter that deals with inflectional morphology. We won’t be covering all of it but we’ll focus on roughly the first three sections.
Bickel and Nichols (2007) is a chapter from three-volume work on typology. The whole volume is a very rich overview of lots of topics in typology — if you have lots of time on your hands, go and have a look!
Bickel and Nichols (2007) use the term formatives for what we’re calling “inflectional markers” in the course. I haven’t adopted formative because it is maybe not as wide-spread as the more general term.
We discussed two main areas in which the expression of morphology differs across languages, namely whether inflectional markers are bound or free (synthesis or fusion), and how many morphemes a single marker expresses (exponence). For both of these topics, we’ve only touched upon the tip of the typological iceberg, so you’re very welcome to read more and get in touch if you have any questions!
We started off Week 7 by discussing what morphosyntax is and what some typical examples of morphosyntactic phenomena are.
A typical morphosyntactic phenomeon is agreement. In agreement, a morphological marker (often on the verb) expresses (or “indexes”) some element of the clause, often an argument such as the subject or an object. It is morphosyntactic, because properties of a syntactic relation are expressed in morphology.
Bound and free inflectional markers
The first aspect of variation we considered to what extent inflectional markers (Bickel & Nichols’s formatives) are bound to another expression or free, meaning that they show properties of being a separate word.
You might notice over your linguistic career that linguistic terminology is not always very consistent across time and researchers. This is one of those cases. As I mentioned in a sidenote on Monday’s handout, to what extent an expression is bound or free is referred to as synthesis by some authors, for example Comrie (1989) and Whaley (1997). Others, including Bickel and Nichols (2007) and Velupillai (2012) call this fusion.
The issue here is that fusional morphology is sometimes used to describe concatenative and cumulative morphology that is characteristic of many Indo-European languages (but not present-day Germanic languages other than German). Keep this in mind when reading and coming across these terms.
As also mentioned in the same note, before the 20th century, some linguists characterised whole languages as being “isolating”, “fusional”, or “agglutinative” — Sapir (1921) (127–156) and Robins (2013) (Chapter 7) discuss this. This does not really work since many languages will show a range of different ways of expressing morphology; if anything, this is a very crude characterisation of the properties of a language.
Terminology aside, the main degrees of synthesis or fusion identified by many linguists are the following:
- isolating (mostly free inflectional markers, appearing as separate words)
- concatenative (multiple inflectional markers “chained” to a stem)
- non-concatenative or non-linear (meaning is expressed through stem changes or suprasegmental markers such as tone or accent)
Exponence
A second dimension of variation was exponence. This aspect of variation addresses how much meaning is packed into a marker. In cumulative exponence, multiple morphemes are expressed in one marker which cannot be segmented any further. Since a morpheme is a unit of meaning, this means that a single marker expresses multiple aspects of meaning. In the lecture, we exemplified this using plural and accusative. In Latin, plural and accusative are often expressed together in a single inflectional marker that cannot be separated into a “plural” and an “accusative” part. This is cumulative exponence. In contrast, Turkish separates these meanings into two separate affixes. The latter, Turkish-type is called separative exponence.
Synthesis and exponence
On Wednesday and in the practical on Friday, we talked more about how synthesis and exponence combine across languages and whether all types of combinations are attested in the languages of the world. This is an exciting question because if some pattern is missing (or much rarer than the others), we learn that cross-linguistic variation is not completely random and we can start to wonder why. Maybe there are particular types of synthesis and exponence that are not compatible with each other or some types are more efficient or arise more frequently for other reasons. Once we discuss this, we’re going beyond description and we’re trying to explain patterns of variation. Fun!