Systems of Morphemes

How do different languages arrange their meaningful pieces? How many meanings can they let one piece have? In this week's episode, we look at morphological typologies: how different languages link up their morphemes (or don't!), how they connect one or more meanings to a given sound, and how they can mix and match between different morpheme options.
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This is Topic #42!
This week's tag language: Welsh!
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Looking forward to next week!

[@always_snape816]

I just have to mention that: I love your shirt choice! I'm completely on your and John Green's side with that :D

[@jacksonrosembachdeoliveira4281]

In Portuguese, nouns are agglutinative, but verbs are fusional. So opposite systems can be found in a single language.

[@Pakanahymni]

Doesn't the -s in third person present actually code for person, number, tense AND mood, since it's not in the subjunctive "that he investigate"

[@robert_wigh]

1:38 Not to be confused with isolate languages or language isoletes, e.g. Basque.

[@Raphael0729]

`Hey, just a heads up--the a in investīgat is short (a shortens before final t). Love the show, thanks for making so many interesting videos!

[@eve3614]

what would a syntactic analysis of a polysynthetic language look like? for instance, greenlandic inuit, where entire sentences can be just one word in length. i'm still a student, so this is probably something i'll learn about later, but for now i'm curious. in all the kinds of syntactic analysis i've seen, the syntax is broken up on the level of the word, not the morpheme. (like, "cats" is one node in the tree--you don't get one for "cat" and one for "s"). so, how would this work in a polysynthetic language like greenlandic inuit? i can imagine that you would be able to find phrase-like structures within its agglutinative morphology. would you just build your tree based on morphemes rather than words? so have an "adjective-morpheme phrase" and a "plural-morpheme phrase" instead of traditional "noun phrase", "verb phrase", and so on? and furthermore, how would you accomplish this for a fusional polysynthetic language, where maybe finding phrase-like structures within the morphology is a bit more challenging?

[@keegster7167]

There would be phrase like structures, for most polysynthetic languages, but they would be inseparable for various reason (dependent on the language). Fusional polysynthetic languages might no have phrase-like structures but instead not have as much in one word, meaning that it wouldn't be *as* polysynthetic. Or they could have a lot of fusional affixes along with morphemes that can make phrases like having endings for the grammatical purpose for the morphemes, for instance.

[@zme214]

I don't understand why Turkish wouldn't be polysynthetic. What's the distinction I'm not getting between that and agglutinative morphology?

[@thelingspace]

Basically, the distinction is between how tightly everything gets bound up. In Turkish, you can stack a lot of morphemes onto a stem, and each one has its own distinct meaning. But each of the words in the sentence is still a distinct prosodic entity. This is easy to tell because of phonological processes that work at different levels. For Turkish, we can see that the sentence is still split up into different words, because of vowel harmony; there's a good description of it here: www.laits.utexas.edu/phonology/turkish/harmony.html Vowel harmony applies at the word level, and the fact that we see different harmonies across a sentence in Turkish is a sign that words may be tied together, but not whole sentences. For polysynthetic languages, sentences are even more tightly bound together, and for phonology purposes, act as if they are all one big word. That's the main difference there which I'd say shows why Turkish isn't polysynthetic. Hope this helps! ^_^

[@keegster7167]

Also, agglutinating languages have just one meaning per morpheme, while synthetic languages' meanings of morphemes can depend on their position and other things.

[@CarpeClunes]

Can I get a copy-pasteable version of your "stacked up morphemic tower" at 3:36?

[@batuhan_a_kocak]

CarpeClunes Ölümsüzleştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine

[@microturnip731]

My professor keep posting your videos on her ling lectures. I wonder who is teaching the class = =

[@NEWT-17]

What's up with all of the bat stuff?

[@sugarwarlock]

Isn't Feldermaus -> Fledermäuse umlaut and not ablaut? I think I've heard that somewhere. I am German so I have no idea if it actually is. I'm also not a linguist so maybe I don't understand the difference but as far as I know, with ablaut, you just go away from the initial vowel. Like, the vowels in goose and geese are nothing alike, really. But in Maus and Mäuse, the vowels are similar and äu is more of a slightly modified au.

[@DubioserKerl]

Umlaut is the class of the "ü" vowel, but Ablaut describes the fact that the u is changed to ü in the plural form. To the Ablaut transforms the u into its Umlaut form.

[@coreylevinson7339]

batman tshirt, bat around the topic

[@thelingspace]

Corey Levinson Sometimes, we are more subtle about these things than others.

[@coreylevinson7339]

The Ling Space ive really enjoyed watching all your videos since near the beginning. Tom Scott linked me to you and DS Bingham (haven't watched him as much as you) when I messaged where to find more linguistic videos. your videos are always so interesting!

[@thelingspace]

Corey Levinson Thanks so much! We definitely try. And we're fans of both Tom Scott and DS Bigham here, so it's good company. ^_^

[@mitigiant5328]

My language is agglutinative and fusional

[@zerbgames1478]

Abele Giant Then it's just fusional tbh. Fusional languages tend to do at least some agglutination.