Analytical language. General linguistics. Structural and social typology of languages
There are several types of languages grammatical structure. The most common and well-known: synthetic and analytical. For example, Russian is a synthetic language. This means that various grammatical meanings - time, gender, number - are expressed within one word: prefixes, suffixes, endings are added. To change the meaning grammatically, you need to change the word itself.
English is analytical. Its grammar is built according to other laws. In such languages, grammatical meanings and relationships are conveyed not through word changes, but through syntax. That is, suggestions are added modal verbs and other separate parts of speech and even other syntactic forms. For example, in English, grammatical meaning also has word order.
Of course, English cannot be called an absolutely analytical language, just as Russian is not completely synthetic. These are relative concepts: it's just that in English there are much fewer inflections (endings, suffixes and other parts of the word that change it) than in Russian. But in a "real" analytical language, they should not exist at all.
One of the main features of English analyticism
- words can move from one part of speech to another in the same form. Only the context and word order help to understand that it is not a noun that is meant, but a verb.
Compare:
The air
is polluted in this area.
– The air in this area is polluted. 
We have to air the room. We need to air out the room.
In analytical English, you can compose compound words from several words without changing the constituent parts, without using the connecting parts of the word. Sometimes such "composites" can consist of five to seven or even more words.
For example:
HeisanannoyingI-know-everything-in-the-worldstudent. He is one of those annoying students who think they know everything.
Each analytical language has its own developmental features.
For example, in English, unlike other European languages, verbs are more susceptible to analytics than adjectives or nouns. To change the tense of a verb, you often have to use auxiliary verbs and auxiliary words, rather than inflections: havebeendoing , waseating , willcall .
Linguists say that over time, analytic languages become synthetic, and vice versa. Probably, in a few hundred years, the English language will acquire an expanded system of inflections and get rid of auxiliary verbs and prepositions. But while we have to learn complex system times, numerous phrasal verbs And don't forget about word order in English.
MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES OF LANGUAGES
Morphological typology (and this is chronologically the first and most developed area of typological research) takes into account, firstly, the ways of expressing grammatical meanings and, secondly, the nature morpheme compounds in a word. Depending on the ways of expressing grammatical meanings, there are synthetic and analytic languages(§ 26; see also § 27). Depending on the nature of the connection, morphemes are distinguished agglutinative and fusional languages(§§ 28-29).
26. Analytic and synthetic languages
In the languages of the world, there are two main groups of ways of expressing grammatical meanings: 1) synthetic ways and 2) analytical. Synthetic methods are characterized by the combination of a grammatical indicator with the word itself (this is the motivation for the term synthetic). Such an indicator that introduces the grammatical meaning "inside the word" can be ending, suffix, prefix, internal inflection(i.e. alternation of sounds in the root, for example, flow - flow - flow), change accents (legs - legs), suppletive modification word stems ( I - me, go - go, good - better), transfix(in Semitic languages: a complex consisting of several vowels, which is "woven" into a three-consonant root, adding to it
Most languages have both analytical and synthetic means of expressing grammatical meanings, but their specific weight varies. Depending on which methods prevail, languages of a synthetic and analytical type are distinguished. All are synthetic languages. Slavic languages(except Bulgarian), Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Yakut, German, Arabic, Swahili and many more. others
The languages of the analytical system include all the Romance languages, Bulgarian, English, Danish, Modern Greek, New Persian and many others. etc. Analytical methods in these languages prevail, however, synthetic grammatical means are also used to some extent.
Languages in which there are almost no possibilities for the synthetic expression of a number of grammatical meanings (as in Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Thai, etc.), in early XIX V. called amorphous("formless"), i.e. as if devoid of form, but already Humboldt called them insulating. It has been shown that these languages are by no means devoid of grammatical form, just a series of grammatical meanings (precisely syntactic,
relational meanings) are expressed here separately, as if "isolated", from the lexical meaning of the word (For details, see Solntseva 1985, Solntsev 1995).
There are languages in which a word, on the contrary, turns out to be so “overburdened” with various auxiliary and dependent root morphemes that such a word turns into a sentence in meaning, but at the same time remains shaped like a word. Such a "word-sentence" device is called incorporation(lat. incorporate- "inclusion in its composition", from lat. in- "in and corpus- "body, whole"), and the corresponding languages - incorporating, or polysynthetic(some Indian languages, Chukchi, Koryak, etc.).
Synthetic(from Greek. synthesis- combination, compilation, association) - based on synthesis, united.
The section is very easy to use. In the proposed field, just enter the desired word, and we will give you a list of its meanings. It should be noted that our site provides data from different sources- encyclopedic, explanatory, derivational dictionaries. Here you can also get acquainted with examples of the use of the word you entered.
What does "synthetic languages" mean?
Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1998
synthetic languages
a class of languages in which grammatical meanings are expressed within a word using affixes or internal inflection, e.g. Russian, German, Lithuanian and other Indo-European languages.
typological class of languages in which synthetic forms of expression of grammatical meanings predominate. S. i. are contrasted with analytical languages, in which grammatical meanings are expressed with the help of function words, and polysynthetic languages, in which several nominal and verbal lexical meanings are combined within an integrally formed complex (outwardly resembling a word). The basis for dividing languages into synthetic, analytic, and polysynthetic is essentially syntactic, so this division intersects with the morphological classification of languages, but does not coincide with it. The division of languages into synthetic and analytical was proposed by A. Schlegel (only for inflectional languages), A. Schleicher extended it to agglutinative languages. Morphemes included in a word in S. Ya. can be combined according to the principle of agglutination, fusion, and undergo positional alternations (for example, Turkic vowel harmony). Synthetic forms are found in a large part of the world's languages. Since the language, in principle, is not typologically homogeneous, the term "S. I." applied in practice to languages with enough a high degree synthesis, for example, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, most Semitic-Hamitic, Indo-European (ancient), Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian, some African (Bantu), Caucasian, Paleo-Asiatic, American Indian languages.
Lit .: Kuznetsov P. S., Morphological classification of languages, M., 1954; Uspensky B. A., Structural typology of languages, M., 1965; Rozhdestvensky Yu. V., Typology of the word, M., 1969; Linguistic typology, in the book: General linguistics, v. 2, M., 1972; Home K. M., Language typology 19th and 20th century views, Wash., 1966; Pettier B., La typologie, in Le langage, Encyclopedie de la Pleiade, v. 25, P., 1968.
In the typological characteristics of inflectional languages, a special place is occupied by the determination of the proportion of synthetic and analytical forms of the language, the role of functional words in the formation of word forms, phrases and sentences. Russian has a synthetic structure, English has an analytical one.
Analytical structure involves a wider use of service words, as well as phonetic means and word order for the formation of word forms and phrase forms. The languages of the analytical system are English, French, Hindustani, Persian, Bulgarian. Affixation, for example, in English is used mainly for word formation (past tense suffix ed). Nouns and adjectives are characterized by the poverty of inflection forms; on the contrary, the verb has a developed system of tense forms, which are formed almost exclusively analytically. Syntactic constructions are also distinguished by analyticism, since the main role in the expression of syntactic meanings, it belongs to functional words, word order and intonation.
Synthetic tuning characterized by a greater role of word forms formed with the help of affixes - inflections and formative suffixes and prefixes. languages synthetic tuning are Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and most other Indo-European languages; all ancient written Indo-European languages were synthetic, for example, Latin, Greek, Gothic.
Morphological types of languages:
1. Insulating (root isolating, amorphous) type (aging). These languages are characterized by complete or almost complete absence inflections and, as a result, a very large grammatical significance of the word order (subject - definition of the subject - definition of the predicate - predicate), each root expresses one lexical meaning, weak opposition of meaningful and service roots. The root isolating languages are Chinese, Vietnamese, Dungan, Muong and many others. etc. Modern English is evolving towards root isolation.
2. Agglutinative (agglutinative) type. Languages of this type are characterized by a developed system of inflection, but each grammatical meaning has its own indicator, the absence of grammatical alternations at the root, the same type of inflection for all words belonging to the same part of speech (i.e., the presence of a single type of declension for all nouns and a single for all verbs of the conjugation type), the number of morphemes in a word is not limited. These include Turkic, Tungus-Manchurian, Finno-Ugric languages, Kartvelian, Andaman and some other languages. The principle of agglutination is also the basis of the grammar of the artificial language in Esperatno.
For example, let's take the instrumental case plural Komi-Permyak word "sin" (eye) - "sinnezon". Here the morpheme "nez" is an indicator of the plural, and the morpheme "on" is an indicator of the instrumental case.
3. Inflectional (inflectional, fusional). Languages of this type are characterized by a developed system of inflection (diversity of declensions and conjugations: in Russian - three declensions and two conjugations, in Latin - five declensions and four conjugations.) and the ability to convey the entire gamut of grammatical meanings with one indicator:
Internal inflection, that is, with grammatically significant alternation at the root (Semitic languages),
External inflection (ending), fusion, that is, with the simultaneous expression of several grammatical meanings with one affix (for example, in the Russian word "home" the ending of the word "-a" is both a sign and male, and plural and nominative).
Also in these languages, one affix can express different meanings(suffix -tel-: face teacher, device switch, abstract factor, substance blood substitute), the number of morphemes in one word is limited (no more than six; the exception is German), the presence of proper and common nouns, the presence different type accents.
These include Slavic, Baltic, Italic, some of the Indian and Iranian languages.
4. A number of typologists also highlight incorporating (polysynthetic) languages where there are "word-sentences", complex complexes: in the composition verb form includes (sometimes in a truncated form) nominal stems corresponding to the object and circumstances, the subject, as well as some grammatical indicators. These include languages Chukotka-Kamchatka family, some languages of the Indians of North America.
A feature of this type of language is that the sentence is constructed as a compound word, i.e., unformed word roots are agglutinated into one common whole, which will be both a word and a sentence. Parts of this whole are both the elements of the word and the members of the sentence. The whole is a word-sentence, where the beginning is the subject, the end is the predicate, and additions with their definitions and circumstances are incorporated (inserted) into the middle. For the Mexican example: ninakakwa, Where ni- "I", naka- “ed-” (i.e. “eat”), a kwa- object, "meat-". In Russian, three grammatically designed words are obtained I eat meat, and vice versa, such a fully-formed combination as ant-eater, does not constitute an offer.
In order to show how you can this type languages to “incorporate”, here is another example from the Chukchi language: you-ata-kaa-nmy-rkyn- “I kill fat deer”, literally: “I-fat-deer-kill-do”, where is the skeleton of the “body”: you-nmy-rkyn, which incorporates kaa- "deer" and its definition ata- "fat"; The Chukchi language does not tolerate any other arrangement, and the whole is a word-sentence, where the above order of elements is also observed.
Some analogue of incorporation in Russian can be the replacement of the sentence "I fish" with one word - "fishing". Of course, such constructions are not typical for the Russian language. They are clearly artificial. Moreover, in Russian, in the form compound word can only imagine a simple non-proprietary proposal with a personal pronoun as the subject. It is impossible to “fold” into one word the sentence “The boy is fishing” or “I am fishing good fish". In incorporating languages, any sentence can only be represented as a single compound word. So, for example, in the Chukchi language, the sentence “We guard new networks” will look like “Mytturkupregynrityrkyn”. It can be said that in incorporating languages the boundary between word formation and syntax is blurred to a certain extent.
Speaking about the four morphological types of languages, we must remember that just as there is no chemically pure, unadulterated substance in nature, there is not a single completely inflectional, agglutinative, root-isolating or incorporating language. Thus, the Chinese and Dungan languages, which are predominantly root-isolating, contain some, albeit insignificant, elements of agglutination. There are also elements of agglutination in inflected Latin (for example, the formation of forms of the imperfect or the future first tense). And vice versa, in agglutinative Estonian we encounter elements of inflection. So, for example, in the word töötavad (work), the ending "-vad" denotes both the third person and the plural.
This typological classification of languages, which is basically morphological, cannot be considered final, mainly because of its inability to reflect all the specifics of a particular language, taking into account its structure. But it contains in an implicit form the possibility of its refinement by analyzing other areas of the language. For example, in isolating languages such as classical Chinese, Vietnamese, and Guinean, one-syllable words equal to a morpheme, the presence of polytony, and a number of other interrelated characteristics are observed.
Russian language is inflectional language of the synthetic structure .
The analytical structure involves a wider use of function words, phonetic means and word order to form word forms, phrases and sentences. The languages of the analytical system are English, French, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Bulgarian and some other Indo-European languages.
The synthetic structure is characterized by the fact that along with the use of service words, word order and intonation, a large role belongs to the forms of words formed with the help of affixes - inflections and formative suffixes and prefixes. The languages of the synthetic system are Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and most other Indo-European languages; all ancient written Indo-European languages were synthetic, for example, Latin, Greek, Gothic.
50. Typological K. I.(see also Morphological classification of languages) arose on the basis of morphological data, regardless of genetic or spatial proximity, relying solely on the properties of the linguistic structure. Typological K. I. seeks to cover the material of all languages of the world, to reflect their similarities and differences, and at the same time to identify possible language types and specifics of each language or group of typologically similar languages. Modern typological K. I. relies not only on morphological data, but also on phonology, syntax, and semantics. The basis for the inclusion of the language in the typological K. I. is the type of the language, that is, the characteristic of the fundamental properties of its structure. However, the type is not implemented absolutely in the language; in fact, each language has several types, that is, each language is polytypological. Therefore, it is appropriate to say to what extent in the structure given language there is one type or another; on this basis, attempts are made to give a quantitative interpretation of the typological characteristics of the language. The main problem for typological K. I. is the creation of descriptions of languages, sustained in a single terminology and based on a single concept of linguistic structure and a system of consistent and sufficient criteria for a typological description. The most accepted typological type is the isolating (amorphous) type - unchangeable words with the grammatical significance of word order, a weak opposition of meaningful and auxiliary roots (for example, ancient Chinese, Vietnamese, Yoruba); agglutinating (agglutinative) type - a developed system of single-valued affixes, the absence of grammatical alternations in the root, the same type of inflection for all words belonging to the same part of speech, a weak connection (the presence of distinct boundaries) between morphs (for example, many Finno-Ugric languages, Turkic languages, Bantu languages); the inflectional (inflectional) type combines languages with internal inflection, that is, with grammatically significant alternation at the root (Semitic languages), and languages with external inflection, fusion, that is, with the simultaneous expression of several grammatical meanings with one affix (for example, hands - instrumental case, plural), strong connection (lack of distinct boundaries) between morphs and heterogeneity of declensions and conjugations (to some extent - Somali, Estonian, Nakh languages); in ancient and some modern Indo-European languages, internal inflection and fusion are combined. A number of typologists also distinguish incorporating (polysynthetic) languages, where there are “sentence words”, complex complexes: the verb form includes (sometimes in a truncated form) nominal stems corresponding to the object and circumstances, the subject, as well as some grammatical indicators (for example, some languages of the American Indians, some Paleo-Asiatic and Caucasian languages). This typological language, which is basically morphological, cannot be considered final, mainly because of its inability to reflect all the specifics of a particular language, taking into account its structure. But it contains in an implicit form the possibility of its refinement by analyzing other areas of the language. For example, in isolating languages such as classical Chinese, Vietnamese, and Guinean, one-syllable words equal to a morpheme, the presence of polytony, and a number of other interrelated characteristics are observed.
51. Parts of speech - the main classes of words of the language, distinguished on the basis of the similarity of their syntactic, morphological and logical-semantic properties. Significant Ch. river differ. (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) and service (conjunction, preposition, particle, article, etc.). To Ch. r. traditionally also include numerals, pronouns and interjections.
Words can be classified according to the positions they occupy in a phrase. To one Ch. include words that can stand in a sentence in the same syntactic positions or perform the same syntactic functions. In this case, not only the set of syntactic functions is important, but also the degree of characteristic of each of the functions for a given Ch. in Russian, both a noun and a verb can act both as a subject (“a person loves”, “smoking is harmful to health”), and as a predicate (“Ivanov is a teacher”, “a tree is burning”), however, for a verb, the function of the predicate is primary, and the function of the subject is secondary, for a noun, the function of the subject is primary, and the predicate is secondary, for example, a verb can be the subject only with a nominal predicate, and a noun with a predicate of any type. Each Ch. its own set of grammatical categories is characteristic, and this set covers the absolute majority of the words of a given Ch. in Russian, a noun is characterized by number, case and gender (as a word-classifying category), an adjective - degrees of comparison, number, case and gender (as an inflectional category). In the Burmese language, for example, the adjective and the verb are not opposed in this respect (words corresponding to both adjectives and verbs of other languages have the category of degree of comparison).
CH system. modern school grammars goes back to the works of Alexandrian philologists (Dionysius of Thracia, Apollonius Diskol), who distinguished on mixed morphological, semantic and syntactic grounds a name, a verb, a participle, an adverb, an article, a pronoun, a preposition, a union, and nouns, adjectives and numerals were combined in the name (as opposed to Plato, who connected, based on logical-syntactic relations, an adjective with a verb). The system of the Alexandrian philologists also influenced the Arabic grammatical tradition. turn out to be inherent in all languages, at the same time, the difficulties that arise in the morphological approach are avoided (cf. the absence of morphological features in the classification of Russian invariable nouns like “coats”). Composition Ch. V different languages different. The differences relate both to the set of pure blacks and the volume of individual blacks. So, in Russian, French, Latin noun, adjective, verb, adverb. The most constant in languages is the opposition of name and verb, but the universality of this distinction remains unproven.
52.Syntax(from other Greek σύνταξις - “construction, order, compilation”) - a branch of linguistics that studies the structure of sentences and phrases.
The syntax deals with the following main questions:
Connection of words in phrases and sentences;
Consideration of types of syntactic connection;
Definition of types of phrases and sentences;
Determining the meaning of phrases and sentences;
Compound simple sentences into complex ones.
The syntax is static, the object of study of which are structures that are not related to the context and situation of speech: a sentence (as a predicative unit) and a phrase (non-predicative unit) and, most importantly, a member.
Syntax communicative The object of study of which are such problems as the actual and syntagmatic division of a sentence, the functioning of phrases in a sentence, the communicative paradigm of sentences, the typology of an utterance, etc.
Text syntax The objects of study of which are structural diagrams of the phrase, simple and complex sentence, a complex syntactic whole, but various kinds of statements related to the situation of speech, as well as the structure of the text that goes beyond the complex syntactic whole. The study of these phenomena has great importance for linguistic-stylistic and psycholinguistic text analysis.
Syntax functional A kind of syntax that uses the “function-to-tool” approach as a research method, that is, finding out how by grammatical means spatial, temporal, causal, goal relations, etc. are expressed (cf.: the traditional approach “from means to function”, that is, finding out what functions a certain grammatical unit performs).
53. Offer - the minimum syntactic construction used in acts of speech communication, characterized by predicativity and implementing a certain structural scheme. Since any syntactic construction- this is usually a group of words, then in the definition of the sentence through the syntactic construction the information reported in the traditional definition is not lost. However, the definition of a sentence as a syntactic construction is more precise: a syntactic construction is a group of words, but not every group of words constitutes a syntactic construction. Having characterized the sentence as a syntactic construction, we named the property that unites the sentence with some other syntactic units, showed the generic affiliation of the sentence.
A sentence is a minimal syntactic construction used in acts of speech communication, characterized by predicativity and implementing a certain structural scheme. a sentence (even a one-word one), in contrast to a word and a phrase, denotes some actualized situation, i.e., in a certain way correlated with reality. The most important combatant, otherwise structural, feature of the sentence is the closeness of the mutual syntactic links of the components of the sentence. Not a single word of this sentence can act as a main or dependent element in relation to words outside it. This phenomenon is based on the correspondence of each proposal to a certain block diagram, the set of which is finite and specific for each language.