Morphological Typology
Definition:
Morphological typology is the categorization of a language according to the extent to which words in the language are clearly divisible into individual morphemes.
Discussion:
Languages can be classified according to their degree of:
- synthesis (the degree to which a language uses multimorphemic words), along a continuum from isolating to polysynthetic languages, and
- fusion (the degree to which a language fuses multiple grammatical meanings into a single morpheme), along a continuum from fusional to agglutinative languages.
Source:
27–29
This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library. Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003.