Correlations

In the last sections we have seen various ways in which the morphologies of languages can be classified. Typologists are interested in more than classification, however. They are also interested in seeing whether there are any predictable correlations between particular morphological characteristics or between morphological characteristics and other (syntactic or phonological) aspects of grammar. In other words, they seek to find whether there are any patterns to the kinds of morphology one finds in a language, and if there are, why those patterns might exist.

For example, as Whaley (1997: 131) points out, isolating languages usually have rigidly fixed word orders. This correlation makes perfect sense: if a language has no morphological way of marking the function of noun phrases in a sentence, those functions must be signaled by the position of a noun phrase in a sentence.

Linguists such as Joseph Greenberg (1963) and Joan Bybee (1985) have looked at many languages and observed that there are several other correlations to be found. For example, Greenberg noted the two patterns in (50):

If a language has separate morphemes for number and case, and if both are either prefixes or suffixes, the number morpheme almost always occurs closer to the base than the case morpheme.

Observations such as these are called implicational universals. Based on observations of lots of languages, they are not true in every language, but they are true in a statistically significant number of languages.

Bybee (1985) also observed a statistically significant trend in the ordering of inflectional affixes in the languages of the world. What she noticed is that in languages with a number of different inflectional affixes on verbs, those affixes tended to come in a particular order. For example, if a language exhibits both tense and person/number affixes, the tense affix usually comes closer to the verb stem than the person/number affix. And if there are aspectual affixes, these tend to precede tense affixes.

We must still ask, however, why these particular correlations should exist. Bybee, for example, claims that the order of inflectional morphemes on verbs has something to do with their relevance to the verb itself. We might think of this in terms of the concepts of inherent and contextual inflection that we discussed. For example, tense and aspect are inherent categories for verbs, but person and number are contextual: they signal agreement with one or more of a verb’s arguments (its subject or object, for example). So inherent inflection comes closer to the verb stem than contextual inflection. The second of Greenberg’s implicational universals might be explained in the same way. Number is an inherent inflection on nouns, but case is contextual, and inherent marking comes closer to the noun stem than contextual marking. Whether this is generally the case, however, is something that will require looking at many more languages.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

المجمع العلمي يواصل إقامة مسابقة الثقلين القرآنية لطلبة مدارس كربلاء

عضو مجلس إدارة العتبة العباسية المقدسة يطلع على آليات تطوير البرامج التعليمية في مجموعة العميد

مجموعة مناحل الكفيل تختتم مشاركتها في معرض السليمانية الدولي للزراعة والصناعات الغذائية

لتوثيق التراث العلمي.. وفد قسم شؤون المعارف يلتقي عددًا من أعلام مدينة النجف

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

ثورة طبية.. الذكاء الاصطناعي يكشف سرطان الكلى في وقت قياسي

لتعزيز الطاقة والتغلب على التعب.. عليك بـ7 طرق بسيطة

لتحسين الهضم والتحكم في الشهية.. ما أفضل وقت لتناول التمر؟

خبراء يكشفون تأثير الاستحمام في الظلام على جودة النوم !

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

إزالة ثاني أكسيد الكربون من الغلاف الجوي.. ما دور المحيطات والبحار؟

نظائر الهيليوم مقياس لاكتشاف رواسب الذهب.. كيف ذلك؟

الصين تطلق أول ناقلة نفط خام ذكية في العالم تعمل بالميثانول

الزمن على المريخ أسرع من الأرض.. دراسة علمية تكشف الفوارق

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Constituent structure

A typology of word structure

Analyzing position classes

Representing word structure

Different kinds of morphemes

Morphemes Definition of “morpheme”

Analyzing word structure

Mirror in nominal morphology

Appendix 2: Hapax legomena from the Cobuild corpus

Appendix 1: 20th century neologisms from the OED

Morphological Productivity Structural Constraints in English Derivation Conclusion

Verbal derivation and the separation hypothesis