Praguian Typology of Languages

Mutual Favourability of Fixed Word Order and Arcitles

• The Isolating (Analytical) type of language, i.e. English, has, as one of its defining properties, an abundance of function words
• This fact leads to no need for many word endings because many of functions which in other types of languages might require a large amount of word endings are dealt with via grammatically fixed word order
• The abundance of function words, including a substantial amount of monosyllabic ones, leads to a heavy dependance on vowels to distinguish the words.
• That leads to a large amount of simple naming units which leads to conversion or word classes being commonplace as well with the lexicon being only weakly organized by means such as affixation.
• Another feature is occurence of prepositional cases and embedded clauses.
• Ultimately, infinitives and possessive constructions exhibit prepositions and articles have the form of function words

Inflection Suffices With a Single Ending X Agglutination Languages Require Several Affixes

• Agglutination grammatical affixes are not differentiated from the derivational ones
• Inflection languages have in their stem alterations implied accumulation of functions in their endings (which express case, number and gender or person, number, tense and mood)
• The accumulation of functions opens up possibilies for the inflection languages to convey the topic/focus articulation via word order as opposed to the agglutination languages

How is this reflected on phonetic level?

• Agglutination languages produce much longer polysyllabic words and thus their reliance on vowels is lower which leads to possibility of vowel harmony
• Inflection languages are more reliant on vowels than agglutination languages.

What is the typological relevance of grammatical gender?

• Genders are in agglutination languages absent as is congruence.
• Because of the functions of inflection endings the adjectives, which have their endings as well, express congruence as well as gender.