Students of linguistics often have a sense of excitement when they come upon data from languages they’ve never heard of before and discover how very different languages can look from one another. Although linguists in the generative tradition are always quick to stress that languages are more alike underlyingly than they seem superficially, what often strikes students first are the wonderfully exuberant ways in which languages can do things differently. Some of what gives this impression of difference is the unique way in which the morphology of languages can package different concepts in different forms.

The linguist Edward Sapir, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, had a rather romantic name for the unique combination of processes that characterize the grammar of each language – he called it the “genius” of the language

For it must be obvious to anyone who has thought about the question at all or who has felt something of the spirit of a foreign language that there is such a thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. This type or plan or structural “genius” of the language is something much more fundamental, much more pervasive than any single feature of it that we can mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its nature by a mere recital of the sundry facts that make up the grammar of the language.

These days, linguists might find quaint Sapir’s idea that each language is imbued with something like a special spirit or soul that embodies its ‘basic plan’. But Sapir’s idea of “genius” comes close to that feeling that students have that the new languages they encounter are in some sense new creatures.

In this section we take a brief look at five very different languages – Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Samoan, Latin, and Nishnaabemwin -- to try to see something of this unique combination of morphological processes that constitutes at least one part of the genius of each language. All of these languages use morphology in one way or another, but each makes different choices from the universal toolbag of rule types that we have surveyed so far in this book. Some use predominantly one strategy, others many; some have lots of inflection, others almost none. But each has its own unique pattern.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

الهيأة العليا لإحياء التراث تشارك بمؤتمر دولي عن السيد الميلاني (قدس سره) في إيران

وفد متحف الكفيل يطّلع على النفائس والوثائق التاريخية في متاحف العتبة الرضوية المقدسة

قسم الشؤون الطبية يواصل تنظيم ورش تدريبية لرفع كفاءة المنتسبين في الإسعافات الأولية

المجمَع العلميّ يختتم الختمة القرآنية المرتلة في محافظة صلاح الدين

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

خصوصا مع تقدم السن.. 6 سلوكيات يومية قد تدمّر صحتك

فاكهة خضراء.. علاج طبيعي فعّال للإمساك واضطرابات الهضم

روسيا تبدأ أولى التجارب السريرية للقاح واعد ضد السرطان

كنز غذائي على طبقك.. ماذا تفعل السبانخ بجسمك؟

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

رصد نوع نادر من القطط في تايلاند للمرة الأولى منذ عقود

روسيا تخطط لإقامة محطة نووية في القمر خلال العقد المقبل

كيف قاد إيلون ماسك حملة "غروك" لاختراق عرش الذكاء الاصطناعي

ألتمان: الذكاء الاصطناعي سيتجاوز البشر في 2026 !

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Constituent structure

A typology of word structure

Analyzing position classes

Representing word structure

Different kinds of morphemes

Morphemes Definition of “morpheme”

Analyzing word structure

Mirror in nominal morphology

Appendix 2: Hapax legomena from the Cobuild corpus

Appendix 1: 20th century neologisms from the OED

Morphological Productivity Structural Constraints in English Derivation Conclusion

Verbal derivation and the separation hypothesis