SILGLOBALGlossary of
Linguistic Terms

Glossary term M

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.

See also

Morpheme Isolating Language Polysynthetic Language Fusional Language Agglutinative Language

Sources 1

  1. Payne, T. 1997a, 27–29
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