Analytic language

An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be called analytic if it uses unbound morphemes, which are separate words, and/or word order. Analytic languages are in contrast to synthetic languages.

A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of any type of morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating language would be analytic by necessity, lacking inflectional morphemes by definition. However, the reverse is not necessarily true: a language can have derivational morphemes while lacking inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words,[1] giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet, since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.

The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. English has lost much of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic and Old English over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, making it more analytic than most Indo-European languages. For example, while Proto-Indo-European had inflections for eight cases in its nouns, standard English has lost all of them.

For comparison, nouns in Russian inflect for at least six cases, most of them descended from Proto-Indo-European cases, whose functions English translates using other strategies like prepositions, verbal voice, word order and possessive ’s instead.

However, English is also not totally analytic in its nouns as it does use inflections for number, e.g. "one day, three days; one boy, four boys". Mandarin Chinese has, in contrast, no inflections in its nouns at all: compare 一天 yī tiān 'one day', 三天 sān tiān 'three days' (literally "three day"); 一个男孩 yī ge nánhái 'one boy' (lit. "one [entity of] male child"), 四个男孩 sì ge nánhái 'four boys' (lit. "four [entity of] male child"). Instead English is considered to be weakly inflected.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Li, Charles and Thompson, Sandra A., Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar, University of California Press, 1981, p. 46.
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