What is 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
	How to determine the morphological type of a language

Source
	Payne, T. 1997a 27–29

Context for this page:

Concept module: morphological typology
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): M
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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