§4. The distribution of languages as to their structural significance:

Inflective languages -e.g. Slavonic, Baltic.

Characteristics: polyfunctional nature of grammatical morphemes, the actualization of the phonetic processes on their joints, phonetically non-justified changes in a root, semantically non-motivated types of declination and conjugation.

Аgglutinative languages — e.g. Turkic, Bantu.

Characteristics: highly developed system of derivational and formal affixation,the absence of phonetically non-justified morphemic versions, the unific type of declination and conjugation, monosemantic affixes, the absence of suppletive forms.

Isolated languages — e.g. Chinese, Japanese and a great number of South-Eastern languages (mjao-yao-мяо-яо, tai-kadai -тай-кадайские ,etc).

Characteristics: no word change, no grammatical significance, weak counter position of notional and function words.

Incorporated languages — e.g. the languages of Northern-Eurasian peoples and many languages of Northern America(Chuktcha, Eskimo, etc)

Characteristics: possible inclusion into the composition of a verb-predicate other members of a sentence ( more frequent – an object, less frequent –a subject), some times with the cases of a concomitant morphophonological change in a stem.

Developing Skills in Preparing for linguistic typology:

Tasks for the seminars:

• Speak on the main principles of typological comparisons;

• Give your opinion on the structural essence of 1/ synthetic language; analytical language; incorporative; isolating;

• Explain the divergences in language classification, presented W.fon Humboldt, E.Sapir, I.Meschaninov, V.Skalichka;

• Give structural characteristics for each type of a language.

Summary

In this lecture there were presented the main principles for typological investigation of languages within domain of structural typology and, in this connection, there was distinguished the notion of a language type. There was given the notion of the synthetic and analytical essence of a language type. There was emphasized the fact of no genealogical or territorial influence upon structural status of a language.