Re: Unilang: the Morphology
| From: | Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, April 22, 2001, 3:41 |
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On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 21:02:55 -0400, Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
wrote:
>Such an idea as English verbal -s "third person singular simple present"
>would be more inflecting than agglutinating.
>
>Er, that's my impression. I could be wrong.
That's correct; and that's why the concept "inflecting" has been
renamed "fusional", AFAIK. That says alot more about the definition of this
typological characteristic: more than one grammatic variable can be
contained in a single morpheme. Whereas agglutinative langs will, in
theory, have a strict one-to-one correspondence.
I say "in theory" because according to what I've read, the whole
terminology has proven a bit crude; there are plenty of "fusional-
agglutinative" langs, exhibiting both characteristics. Therefore, it's more
like a spectrum of two extremes, rather than two mutually exclusive systems.
Óskar
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