Analytic language
Information about Analytic language
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An analytic language is any language where syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order rather than by inflection. The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language.
A related, often-confused concept is that of an isolating language. An isolating language is any language where the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and are considered to be full-fledged "words". The degree of isolation is defined by the morphemes-per-word ratio. By contrast, in a synthetic language, words are composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote their syntactic meanings.
Features of analytic languages
Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words, while synthetic languages tend to use adpositions, affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose.Analytic languages have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance; for example, Chinese and English make use of word order to show subject-object relationship. Chinese also uses word order to show definiteness (where English uses "the" and "a"), topic-comment relationships, the role of adverbs (whether they are descriptive or contrastive), and so on.
Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context and pragmatic considerations for the interpretation of sentences, since they don't specify as much as synthetic languages in terms of agreement and cross-reference between different parts of the sentence.
Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:
| 明天 | 我 | 的 | 朋友 | 會 | 爲 | 我 | 做 | 一 | 個 | 生日 | 蛋? |
| 明天 | 我 | 的 | 朋友 | 会 | 为 | 我 | 做 | 一 | 个 | 生日 | 蛋? |
| míngtīan | wǒ | de | péngyŏu | huì | wèi | wǒ | zuò | yī | ge | shēngrì | dàngāo |
| tomorrow | I | (subordinating particle) | friend(s) | will | for | me | (to) make | one | (classifier) | birthday | cake |
As can be seen, each syllable (or sometimes two) corresponds to a single concept; comparing the Chinese to the English translation, one sees that while English itself is still fairly isolating, it contains synthetic features, such as the bound morpheme -/s/ to mark either possession (in the form of a clitic) or number (in the form of a suffix). Further, note that the English verb is independently conjugated into a tense ("will make") indicating that the action will happen in the future. In contrast, the Chinese verb (zuò) is not inflected, and relies on other words to indicate tense (in this case the words míngtīan [tomorrow] and hui [will]).
"zuò" (do) remains the same in the present tense:
| 他們 | 在 | 做 | 作? |
| 他们 | 在 | 做 | 作? |
| tāmén | zài | zuò | zuòyè |
| they | are | doing | homework. |
Outside of China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are analytic languages with the exception of Malay. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to much of eastern Asia's analytic language families including Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Mon-Khmer. Even some Malayo-Polynesian languages such as Cham are more analytic than the rest of their respective family. Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese are all major analytic languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia.
When compared with a synthetic language, such as German, the contrast becomes clear:
| der Mann | die Männer | ||
| der | Mann | die | Männer |
| definite.masculine.nominative.singular | man.singular | definite.nominative.plural | man.plural |
Note that the morpheme "der" corresponds to four separate concepts simultaneously, and the morpheme "die" refers to three concepts (German does not distinguish gender in the plural), but the rules relating "der" and "die" in this manner are quite arbitrary, making this set of morphemes fusional in nature. It is worth mentioning that both "der" and "die" can function as a feminine singular definite article, depending on the grammatical case. Furthermore, the word "Männer" corresponds to two concepts and relates to "Mann" through both the plural marker /-er/ and a process of umlaut that changes "a" to "ä" in many German plurals. Thus, the formation of German plurals is a simple, rule-governed inflectional pattern.
As a result, German can be said to lie between the agglutinative and fusional areas of the spectrum of linguistic typology.
See also
Linguistic Typology is an international peer-reviewed journal in the field of linguistic typology, founded in 1997. It is published by Mouton de Gruyter on behalf of the Association for Linguistic Typology. Its editor-in-chief is Prof. Frans Plank (University of Konstanz).
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Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures.
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A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.
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fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment.
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An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view.
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Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes.
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Definition
The degree of synthesis refers to the morpheme-to-word ratio. Languages with more than one morpheme per word are synthetic...... Click the link for more information.
An oligosynthetic language (from the Greek ὀλίγος, meaning "few" or "little") is any language using very few morphemes, perhaps only a few hundred, which combine synthetically to form statements.
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In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs. The distinction can be made morphologically (through grammatical case or verbal agreement), syntactically (through word
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A nominative-accusative language (or simply accusative language) is one that marks the direct object of transitive verbs distinguishing them from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs.
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An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.
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Ergative vs.
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Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian-type voice system, is a typologically unusual morphosyntactic alignment that combines features of ergative and accusative languages.
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An active-stative language, or active language for short, is one in which the sole argument of an intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way as the agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject in English), and sometimes in the same way as the direct object
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A tripartite language, also called an ergative-accusative language, is one that treats the subject of an intransitive verb, the subject of a transitive verb, and the object of a transitive verb each in different ways.
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A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction. The direct construction is used when the subject of the transitive clause outranks the object in saliency or animacy but the
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The syntactic pivot is the verb argument around which sentences "revolve", in a given language. This usually means the following:
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- If the verb has more than zero arguments, then one argument is the syntactic pivot.
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theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure (the number and type of noun phrases) required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments (i.e., it is ditransitive).
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In linguistic typology, word order is the order in which words appear in sentences. In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions.
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In linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the verb typically comes before the object (thus including SVO, VOS and VSO languages). It was W.P. Lehmann who first proposed to reduce the six possible permutations of word order to just two main ones, VO and OV, in
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In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO), is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements.
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Verb Subject Object (VSO) is a term in linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these constituents in neutral expressions: Ate Sam oranges.
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In linguistic typology, Verb Object Subject or Verb Object Agent - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS or VOA - represents the language-classification type in which the following sequence of the three constituents, in neutral expressions, is
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In linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the verb. They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, i.e. heads are often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place
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In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence.
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Object Subject Verb (OSV) or Object Agent Verb (OAV) is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. OSV or OAV denotes the sequence "Object Subject Verb" in neutral expressions: Oranges Sam ate.
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Object Verb Subject (OVS) or Object Verb Agent (OVA) is one of the permutations of expression used in linguistic typology. OVS denotes the sequence 'Object Verb Subject' in unmarked expressions: Oranges ate Sam, Thorns have roses.
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Time Manner Place (TMP) describes one possible ordering of adpositional phrases in sentences.
Linguistic typology has observed that TMP order is common among Subject Object Verb (SOV) languages.
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- Example: ... yesterday, by car, to the store.
Linguistic typology has observed that TMP order is common among Subject Object Verb (SOV) languages.
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Place Manner Time is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of adpositional phrases in a language's sentences: "to the store by car yesterday". It would seem that it is common among SVO languages. English, French, and Spanish belong to this category.
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.
A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kind of context-free grammars
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In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. In general, it is understood that particles are function words that tend to be uninflected — that is, words which do not have suffixes, for example, that reflect grammatical
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