Comparative typology

Қиёсий типология
Сопоставительная/Контрастивная
типология
LECTURE 1

Introduction.

Lecturer: PhD, Jalolova Sh.M.

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ЎЗБЕКИСТОН МИЛЛИЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТИ, 2020 2
 PLAN:
INTRODUCTION. THE PLACE OF COMPARATIVE TYPOLOGY AMONG
OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS.
1. Typology as a branch of general linguistics.
2. Types of typological research.
3. Brief review of the history of typological doctrines.
4. Typological classification of languages.
a) Genealogical classification.
b) Typological (morphological) classification.
c) Areal classification.
d) Language universals.

5. Methods of typological research.

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 Typology as a branch of general linguistics

Comparative Typology is a branch of general linguistics which studies the structural similarities
between languages regardless of their history.

Comparative Typology studies:

 1. What features do all lang. have in common?

 2. In what ways do different lang. differ from each other?

 3. How does the sound system of the native language differ from the sound system of the foreign
language?
 4.How do grammatical categories differ?

 5. How sentences and phrases are built in different languages?

 6. How are words built in different languages?

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 Types of typological research

Branches of typology:

phonological – studies sounds and their classification and types

lexical – (words and their meaning)

phraseology – (phrases and their meaning)

morphological – (structure of a word , category, case, gender)

general – (types of language, classification)

special – (modern eng. – middle eng.)

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 Brief review of the history of typological doctrines

The history of typological system was studied by German scientist Fridrich Schleggel (1772-1829). He considered
that there was a sharp dividing line between flexional and non-flexional languages. He distinguished two types of
languages.

But his brother August Schleggel divided languages into 3 groups. Languages with flexions, languages which use
affixes, and languages with any grammatical structure where word order has grammatical meaning.

Wilgelm Humboldt was very skeptical about the classifications of the Schlegels, and he explicitly refuted the
legitimation of classifying languages, since languages are individuals and should be described as such.

Another German linguist August Schleicher was the founder of naturalistic theory of language. He accepted three
types of languages but also 3 types of languages have developed out of one another with isolating language as the
starting point. He compares a language is an object of nature and like any object of nature (a tree) it appears,
develops and dies.
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 Typological classification of languages

More than 7000 languages are spoken in the world today. They seem to be quite
different, but some of them have some similar features or principles

There are many kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics, some of

them are genetic (or genealogical), areal (geographical) and typological.

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 Genealogical classification

The purpose of genealogical classification is to group languages into families according to their
degree of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies
as Germanic or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch,
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on
the other. So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into
families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt be radically
revised as further progress is made.

Scholars have now reached a consensus on the existence of about 300 families of languages that
date back some 2000 years. Opinions are more divided about the existence of some 50
“macrofamilies”of languages dating back approximately 5000 years.
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Genealogical classification

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 Typological (morphological) classification

Typological classification of languages - a classification according to the identification of similarities and variations within the structure of languages, no matter
their genetic relatedness. Languages are grouped into language types on the basis of formal criteria, according to their similarities in grammatical structure. There
are several types: flexile (morphological resources), agglutinative (affixes), and rooted (the root of the word as a morphological resource).

Roughly speaking, an isolating (root) language is one in which all the words are morphologically unformed, unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed
of a single morph), words don’t break down into morphemes: roots and affixes. The root languages are Vietnamese, Burmese, Old Chinese, largely modern day
Chinese are highly isolating. Grammatical relations between words in these languages are transmitted by intonation, service words, word order.

An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which represents a
single grammatical category. In their structure, in addition for the root, you will discover affixes (both word-changing and word-forming). The peculiarity of
affixes in these languages is the fact that every single affix is unambiguous, i.e. every of them serves to express only a single grammatical meaning, with what
ever root it’s combined. That is how they differ from inflectional languages, in which the affix acts as a carrier of quite a few grammatical meanings at as soon as.

Inflectional languages – languages in which the leading function in the expression of grammatical meanings is played by inflection (ending). Inflectional
languages involve Indo-European and Semitic-Hamitic. In contrast to agglutinative languages, where affixes are unambiguous, normal and mechanically attached
to full words, in inflectional languages the ending is ambiguous, non-standard, joins the base, that is commonly not made use of with no inflection, and
organically merges using the base, forming a single alloy. The formal interpenetration of contacting morphemes, which leads to the blurring on the boundaries
among them, is called fusion. Hence the second name of inflectional languages – fusion languages.

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 Typological (morphological) classification

Polysynthetic, or incorporating – languages (e.g. Chukchi, Australian language Tiwi, Western

Greenlandic, Papuan languages) in which different components of a sentence within the kind of
amorphous base words are combined into a single complicated, comparable to complicated words.

Hence, in the language in the Aztecs (an Indian people living in Mexico), the word-sentence
pinakapilkva, which indicates I eat meat, was formed in the composition with the words pi – I, nakatl –
meat and kvya – to eat. Such a word corresponds to our sentence.

This can be explained by the truth that in polysynthetic languages different objects of action and
circumstances in which the action requires spot is often expressed not by person members of the sentence
(applications, situations), but by various affixes which can be portion of verb forms. In part, the verb
forms involve the topic.

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 Typological classification

Basic word order classification.

One of the most common ways of classifying languages is by the most typical order of
the subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) in sentences such as “The cat eats the mouse”:
 SVO (“The cat eats the mouse”)

 SOV (“The cat the mouse eats”)

 VSO (“Eats the cat the mouse”)

 OSV (“The mouse the cat eats”)

 OVS (“The mouse eats the cat”)

 VOS (“Eats the mouse the cat”).

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 Typological classification

Basic word order classification.

English is an SVO language, because all the other orders are incorrect or change the basic meaning (“The
mouse eats the cat” means something very different). In some other languages, such as Russian, all these
sentences would be correct, though one order might be much more common (in this case, SVO). In some
languages, the order can depend on different parameters. French is usually SVO, but SOV when the object is a
pronoun.

The most common orders are SVO (found in English, Indonesian, Chinese, Spanish and thousands of other
languages) and SOV (found in Japanese, Persian, Hindi and Turkish among others). VSO is less common (found
in Standard Arabic and Irish), and the three other orders that put the object before the subject are found in less
than 5% of the world languages. Anecdotally, Yoda speaks in OSV order (Strong with the Force you are , but
when 900 years you reach, look as good you will not).
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 Areal classification

Areal classification involves geographic criteria, and covers those languages that are
close by and have developed similar characteristics in terms of structure. Under the
influence of intensive mutual influences, these kinds of languages are creating language
unions such as the Balkan Language Union, encompassing Macedonian, Bulgarian,
Serbian, and Albanian, for example.

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 Language universals

Languages which have the same or similar features are united into different types. These common features are
called universals. We may speak about semantic universals, phonological universals, syntactic universals,
grammatical universals. When the same principles are shared by several languages we speak of language types.

First, we must make a basic distinction between absolute universals and statistical universals. Absolute
universals refer to properties found in all languages, while statistical universals reflect important trends that are
found in a predominant part of the languages of the world, but not necessarily in all.

Language universals may also be generalizations about properties of just a small selection of languages, so-called
implicational universals, which state that if a language has property A, then it also has property B, but not
necessarily the other way round. For instance, if a language has voiced fricatives like [v] and [z] (property A), it
also has unvoiced fricatives like [f] and [s] (property B). The reverse is not true, since many languages have
unvoiced fricatives, but not voiced fricatives.

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 Methods of typological research

1. The main method of typological studies is the comparative method. Comparative linguistics applies this method
as well, but in that trend the elements compared are similar materially, which allows the scholar to establish their
genetic affinity. Typology compares elements that are similar functionally. For example, the English, Russian and
Turkish languages have affixes which form nouns with the meaning "the doer of an action". These are the English
affix -er, the Turkish one -ci, the Russian -тель. They consist of different phonemes and have no common origin,
but they have the same function in the language. So they can be studied in comparative typology.

2. Differences between languages can be quantified. A quantitative method was introduced by Joseph Greenberg.
It is called the method of typological indices.

3. The most typical approach presupposes comparing languages "level by level", i.e. the phonological level of one
language is compared to the phonological level of the other, then the morphological, the syntactical, the lexical
levels are compared.

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ВОПРОСЫ!

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