Re: Branching typologies

Quoting Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>:

> On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Irina Rempt-Drijfhout wrote:
>
> > On Friday 28 September 2001 21:15, you wrote:
> >
> > > Hm. So is Hungarian, with things like "megverethetnelek" derived
> > > from the verb "ver-", "beat", polysynthetic?
> >
> > What I've always heard was that Hungarian is just very very
> > agglutinative.
> >
>
> Hm. Possibly I'm not quite catching the distinction, so I'll break
> that big word down:
[...]

> I guess my problem here is that I've always assumed that
> "agglutinative" applies only to substantives and "polysynthetic" to
> verbs...am I wrong?
Well, "agglutinative" describes the general pattern of a language's
morphology, specifically the ratio of sememes to morphemes.  A
perfectly agglutinative language would be 1:1, and some languages
(Turkish, Esperanto) come very close to this standard.  As for
polysynthesis, on the other hand, I think you're right insofar as
when languages become polysynthetic, they tend to bunch up most of
the semantics of a clause into the verb, but that is a contingent
fact, not one that reflects the notion of polysynthesis per se.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

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