Morphological Typology

Typology - Comparisons of form across languages

1. how much syntactic information is contained in the average word?

Analytic languages: few grammatical affixes; may or may not have derivational affixes. Word order and function words convey syntactic information. 

      Examples:  English, Chinese, Vietnamese. 

Synthetic languages: most words have grammatical affixes (inflections). 

      Examples: most European languages, Swahili, Navaho.

Polysynthetic (or incorporating) language: words tend to be highly complex, with verb and object incorporated into a single word.

      Examples:  Yupik Eskimo, Nootka, many Australian languages.

2. How do morphemes usually build words?

Isolating languages: tend to have very few affixes of any kind.  All isolating languages are analytic. 

      Examples:  Chinese, Vietnamese

Fusional (or inflecting) languages:  build words by adding affixes, but usually not more than one or two in a single word.

      Examples:  most European languages, including English

Agglutinating languages: build words by adding several derivational or inflectional affixes one after the other.

      Examples:  Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and Swahili.

Symbolic fusional languages:  build words by modifying the root rather than adding affixes (tooth-teeth, run-ran).

      Examples:  Found mostly among Afroasiatic languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic.