Praguian Typology of Languages

• Language typology
• Language types – clusters of language properties
• Usually typology follows the co-occurrence of two properties
• The clusters of properties are hypothetical and extreme – in reality only stronger or weaker tensions of languages to the types
• 1) The isolating type – strong differentiation of sentence and word, weak differentiation between word, morpheme and seme
• a)Absence of affixes, lexical and grammatical words are present
• b)Connection between lexical and grammatical morphemes is regular
• c)Phonemic / Semantic level of affixes – no affixes, semantic ambiguity of function words
• d)Numerous function words  fixed word order
• e)Many kinds of dependent word clauses – with conjunctions
• 2)The inflectional type – strong differentiation of seme and morpheme, Latin, most of the Slavonic languages – Czech, Slovak
• a)Different grammatical ending in each occurrence – inflection of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, (numerals)
• b)Each ending expresses various functions of the word – word classes (noun X adjective), subclasses (gender X case)
• c)Endings also serve for derivations
• d)Radical difference between derivational and inflectional affixes
• e)Phonemic level – does not have to be a syllable of its own; Semantic level – one ending can express more functions and ambiguity is possible
• f)Free word order depending on the existence of congruence
• g)Word classes distinguished  space for many dependent clauses
• 3)The polysynthetic type – the strongest differentiation of word and seme, Vietnamese, Thai, Ewe, written Chinese
• a)Lexical and function words – lexical can be also used as grammatical
• b)No opposition between word classes
• c)Word formation by composition
• d)Phonemic / Semantic level – no affixes present, but ambiguity between lexical and grammatical words
• e)Grammatical fixed word order
• f)Dependent clauses are not present, realized by compositions
• 4)The agglutinative type – combining more than one seme in a word– typical for Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Georgian, Basque
• a)Many affixes added to a word basis
• b)These affixes express e.g. person, possession, adverbial values corresponding to prepositions and to subordinating conjunctions
• c)All affixes attached to all word bases – no word classes; affixes also used in word formation
• d)Weakening of the opposition between derivational suffixes and inflectional endings
• e)Phonemic level of affixes – often a syllable of its own; Semantic level – no ambiguity
• f)No congruence – grammatically fixed word order
• g)No word classes  No dependent clauses
• 5) The introflexive type – Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew...) – always connected with syntax of another type
• a) Interruption of a morpheme with a certain meaning (foot - feet) + infixes
• b)Word classes distinguished by introflection
• c)Derivation also by introflection
• d)Phonemic level – lexical and grammatical means are phonemically distinguished
• e)Free word order depending on the existence of congruence (but not that developed)
• f)Word classes distinguished  space for many dependent clauses (not that developed)
• Mutual favourability -
• the tendency of various properties of language types to occur together in a certain language
• e.g. grammatically fixed word order + paucity of inflectional affixes or alternations + abundance of function words in English; word classes division + congruence + free word order in Czech
• they can appear within one language type or across them
• Language construct
• an extreme hypothetical property in a language type, e.g. in the agglutinative type construct there would be only affixes, no derivations, no inflections
• 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 languages' endings the adjectives, which have their endings as well, express congruence as well as gender.