uninflected

　 　

WordNet

1. not inflected; "`boy and `swim are uninflected English words"
2. (of the voice) not inflected; "uninflected words"; "monotonic uninflected speech"

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出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』「2013/11/16 11:24:33」(JST)

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Not to be confused with Language isolate.

Linguistic typology
Morphological
Isolating Synthetic Polysynthetic Fusional Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic
Alignment Accusative Ergative Split ergative Philippine Active–stative Tripartite Marked nominative Inverse marking Syntactic pivot Theta role
Word order
VO languages Subject–verb–object Verb–subject–object Verb–object–subject OV languages Subject–object–verb Object–subject–verb Object–verb–subject Time–manner–place Place–manner–time

An isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio – in the extreme case of an isolating language, words are composed of a single morpheme.

A closely related concept is the analytic language, which in the extreme case does not use any inflections to indicate grammatical relationships (but which may still form compound words or may change the meanings of individual words with derivational morphemes, either of which processes gives more than one morpheme per word).

Isolating languages are in contrast to synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.

Explanation

Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters:

• morpheme-per-word ratio (how many morphemes there are per word)
• degree of fusion between morphemes (how separable words' inflectional morphemes are according to units of meaning represented)

A language can be said to be more isolating than another if its correspondence between word and number of morphemes approaches 1:1 more than the other one.

To illustrate the relationship between words and morphemes, the English word "rice" is a single word consisting of one morpheme only (also "rice"). This word has a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio.

The English word "handshakes", "hand-shake-s", on the other hand, is a single word consisting of three morphemes (namely, hand, shake, -s). This word has a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme-to-word ratio substantially greater than one.

It is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning. For example, the Russian word vídyat/видят 'they see' has a morpheme-per-word ratio of 2:1, having two morphemes: the root vid-/вид-, and the inflectional morpheme -yat/-ят which inflects for four units of meaning (3rd person subject, plural subject, present/future tense, imperfective aspect). Effectively, four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme: -yat/-ят.

Languages that are relatively more isolating have a morpheme-per-word ratio that approaches 1:1. A purely isolating language would lack any visible morphology, since no word would have an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i.e. morphemes) – thus it would lack bound morphemes like affixes.

The morpheme-per-word ratio is a scalar category ranging from low morpheme-per-word ratios (near 1:1) on the isolating hypothetical pole of the scale, to a high morpheme-per-word ratio. The greater a language's morpheme-per-word ratio is, the less isolating and the more synthetic it is.

See also

• Analytic language
• Zero-marking language
• Free morpheme
• Synthetic language
• Linguistic typology

References

Further reading

• Sapir, Edward. www.bartleby.com/186/6.html Types of linguistic structure. In Language: An introduction to the study of speech Chapter 6. (1921).

English Journal

• Noun imageability facilitates the acquisition of plurals: survival analysis of plural emergence in children.

• Smolík F.
• Journal of psycholinguistic research.J Psycholinguist Res.2014 Aug;43(4):335-50. doi: 10.1007/s10936-013-9255-5.
• Some research in child language suggests that semantically general verbs appear in grammatical structures earlier than semantically complex, specific ones. The present study examines whether this was the case in nouns, using imageability as a proxy measure of semantic generality. Longitudinal corpus
• PMID 23737000

• The effect of morphological complexity on verbal working memory: results from Arabic speaking children.

• Cohen-Mimran R1, Adwan-Mansour J, Sapir S.
• Journal of psycholinguistic research.J Psycholinguist Res.2013 Jun;42(3):239-53. doi: 10.1007/s10936-012-9200-z.
• To examine the role of morphology in verbal working memory. Forty nine children, all native speakers of Arabic from the same region and of the same dialect, performed a Listening Word Span Task, whereby they had to recall Arabic uninflected words (i.e., base words), inflected words with regular (pos
• PMID 22485043

• Neurocognitive dimensions of lexical complexity in Polish.

• Szlachta Z1, Bozic M, Jelowicka A, Marslen-Wilson WD.
• Brain and language.Brain Lang.2012 Jun;121(3):219-25. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2012.02.007. Epub 2012 Apr 26.
• Neuroimaging studies of English suggest that speech comprehension engages two interdependent systems: a bilateral fronto-temporal network responsible for general perceptual and cognitive processing, and a specialised left-lateralised network supporting specifically linguistic processing. Using fMRI
• PMID 22541369

Japanese Journal

• 連用・連体接続に基づいた係り受け構文解析の評価

• 全国大会講演論文集 第57回(人工知能と認知科学), 209-210, 1998-10-05
• NAID 110002892581

• 連用・連体接続に基づいた係り受け構文解析

• 全国大会講演論文集 第56回(人工知能と認知科学), 195-196, 1998-03-17
• NAID 110002892193

• 1. Him self, Him selfe, and Him selfa : A Reflexive Pronoun+Uninflected or Nominative Self

• 英文學研究 64(2), 409-410, 1988-01-31
• NAID 110008157270

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• Uninflected | Define Uninflected at Dictionary.com

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