Linguistic typology
The language typology is a system (actually several such systems ) for the classification of languages based on grammatical features. The typological classification differs from the genetic classification, which classifies languages by primary etymological origins, that is, after their original languages in language families, and of the geographical classification, grouped on the basis of which languages caused by prolonged language contact similarities in language frets.
A typological class is called the language type. There are various approaches to language typology.
Morphological Language Typology
Classical morphological typology
Among the earliest typologies of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt heard. They divided the languages a basis of morphological criteria in synthetic and analytical languages.
- Synthetic languages = merging languages express syntactic relations in the sentence at least partially offset by affixes. Subgroups of synthetic languages Agglutinating languages ( such as Turkish or Hungarian),
- Polysynthetic languages (such as the Iroquois languages) and
- Inflectional languages ( merging languages) like most Indo-European languages .
The modern operating parameters with morphological typology
Although the classical classification is used even today frequently, some weak points of the system are in the recent past been criticized: The biggest drawback is that the classical morphological typology of a series of rigid language types postulated that, at best, represent prototypes and in its pure form only very are rare to find. For example, have a predominantly agglutinative language affixes, but also some fusional elements. Therefore, in recent decades an alternative classification system has been proposed, which does not work with pre-built types, but with two parameters, languages move on which, each with smooth transitions.
- The first parameter is the morpheme - per -word rate criterion is therefore the number of morphemes per word. Extreme cases that mark the endpoints of the scale ( representing but not the only ways ) would be on one side completely isolating languages (typically exactly one morpheme per word ), on the other polysynthetic languages (typically potentially large number of morphemes per word).
- The second parameter is the fusion level, ie the level of segmentability of grammatical morphemes. Extreme cases would be here highly merging languages (with low and high segmentability morphophonologischer variance of morphemes ) and agglutination ( segmentability and invariance of morphemes ).
The combination of the two parameters, a lot of the world's languages can be characterized satisfactorily.
Statements such as "Turkish is an agglutinative language," in which only one claim is made to the language type, refer to the classical morphological typology, when two pieces of information is to be made mostly the modern variant implicated as an underlying basis. The statement " Nahuatl is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language" (see the article ) is therefore to be read so that it is a language with many morphemes per word ( polysynthetic ), these are mostly segmentable ( agglutinative ).
Language typology by means of statistics
Aware that language features such as " insulating", " agglutinative " or have " inflecting " in varying degrees, a total of 10 measurements for morphological and syntactic properties were of Greenberg developed, which allow the degree to which language a particular property has to measure accurately. The most common measure is the so-called " synthetic index " in which the number of morphemes of a text is placed in relation to the number of words that contain these morphemes. The result is a characteristic for a considered language, which consists of 10 measurements and allows accurate comparisons with any other languages. This concept was further developed by Altmann & Lehfeldt in which they have discussed and shown the theoretical foundations that between the indices ( dimensions ) are correlations. They have also shown how one can get on this basis with the help of numerical taxonomy to typological classification of languages, and with what result. A continuation of these approaches can be found in Silnitzki, among other things, another Sprachmaß tests and other languages includes in its investigations.
Word order typology
A more recent approach is the universals of Joseph Greenberg, who studied in the languages of the world according to generally occurring Strukturgesetzmäßigkeiten. An example of this is the word order typology, which is based on syntactic criteria. It classifies languages according to the order of subject, object and verb in an unmarked set. Each of these types of languages a class is often called simply just yourself " type of language":
- SVO subject-verb - object, such as English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian
- SOV subject-object - verb, eg, Turkish, Japanese, Persian, Latin (where word order basically free, but there is a strong tendency to SOV or OSV )
- VSO verb-subject - object, such as Gaelic, Welsh, Aramaic, Tagalog, Standard Arabic
In almost all languages , however, the subject precedes the object so that the following three types occur only in very few cases:
- VOS verb - object-subject, such as Malagasy, Javanese
- OSV object-subject - verb, such as Xavante
- OVS object - verb-subject, eg Guarijio
In German and Dutch, this classification is complicated by the fact that the " analytical" compound verb is (although according to fixed rules ) distributed in several parts over the set and subject, all direct and indirect - also genitive - Objects and all local, time - or Modalangaben etc. regularly compliant even before it can be placed, for example, between and: " I have a fox seen in the forest " or " in the woods I saw a fox ," or of course " This fox we should have rid us a long time". These languages are therefore often classified as V2 languages , as the same are the conjugated part of the verb regardless of the position of subject, object and the other parts of the sentence in each case at the second location and the remaining parts of the verb is always at the end of a main clause. More often, however, the order used in the subordinate clause is adopted as the basic word order ( in the subordinate clause is the conjugated part of the verb always at end of block ), in this example, " that I have seen in the forest a fox ", so that the German and the Dutch classified accordingly as SOV be.
Some languages, particularly highly inflected, prepare for the classification in this system special problems because they allow any order of verb and object basically. Examples are Latin and Polish. This, however, is rather on the syntactic analysis approach, which does not help here. In contrast, a pragmatic approach seems weiterzuhelfen such as the one that provides the " Functional Grammar " by Simon Cornelis Dik and roughly between Topik ( the well-known actant, is predicated on the somewhat ) and focus is different ( the most important element of the utterance ). In even more ancient Greek inflectional helps further this approach, such as H. Dik has shown in two books on Herodotus and tragedy language from 1995 and 2007. However, such pragmatic analysis approaches relativize the largely syntactically working word order typologies considerably.
Theo Vennemann and Winfred P. Lehmann, the six basic types reduced by removal of the subject to two ( VO and OV ). The far-reaching consequences, in particular spoke of a historical nature, which they derive from it are in the professional world, however, disputed
Relational Typology ( morphosyntactic alignment )
The relational typology classifies languages in terms of their morphosyntactic expression of the fundamental grammatical relations ( see accusative, active and Ergativsprache ).
Phonological Language Typology
Depending on research interests can lay typological considerations criteria from all sub-disciplines of linguistics as a basis. From the phonological perspective can languages , for example, divided into akzentzählende, morenzählende and silbenzählende. See also: rhythm.