ST KLIMENT OHRIDSKI UNIVERSITY OF SOFIA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Typological Characteristics of English

Typological classification has to do with cross-linguistic comparison. There are two main areas of comparison: the type of language as a whole and the type of a particular linguistic category.

1. Typological features of English as a language type

The definition of a language type depends on the criterion selected as the basis for comparison. The earliest typological classifications were based on the morphological structure of the word:

isolating languages the word coincides with the morpheme, no affixes Example Language: Chinese

agglutinative languages affixes are used to denote single grammatical categories and are added to the root without fusion Example Language: Turkish

inflectional languages affixes are used with a high extent of syncretism, i.e. one and the same affix marks more than one category, affixes often fuse with the root Example Language: Latin, Russian, OE

incorporating languages more than one root in a word in a kind of syntactic relation with each other Example Language: North American Indian

Another basic division of language types is synthetic (roughly corresponding to the agglutinative, inflectional and incorporating types above) versus analytical a language type in which every category ideally has a separate marker. It is essential to emphasize at this point that (1) no single natural language represents a pure type. Usually languages represent a mixture of types; (2) typologies must take into account not only form but function as well. One of the most interesting contributions of language typology is the claim that the morphological types develop unidirectionally in time and the shift from one type to another is cyclic. The direction of change is the following:

lexical items > grammatical morphemes > loss through reduction > new lexical items

ANALYTICAL SYNTHETIC ANALYTICAL

The above sequence of changes describes the process known as grammaticalization, i.e. acquisition of grammatical meaning. If grammatical meaning is defined as obligatory and independent of lexical meaning, grammaticalization may be a matter of degree, as represented in the middle section of the chain of developments above. The history of English is a transition from predominantly synthetic way of expression to predominantly analytical one. This involves a number of grammaticalization processes such as the appearance of the Perfect tenses where the verb to have shifts from a notional verb to an auxiliary. Another example is the grammaticalization of the verb to do in Negative and Interrogative sentences. In most cases,

ST KLIMENT OHRIDSKI UNIVERSITY OF SOFIA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Typological characteristics of English page 2

however, the change consists in an increase of the degree of grammaticalization, for instance the appearance of the article or the regrouping of the category of Object.

Other criteria as bases for typological classification (language type): word order English changed from a SOV language to a SVO type. Topic versus Subject English changed from a Topic-prominent to a Subject-prominent

language Post-position of article; etc.

Classification according to language types is impossible. Languages usually combine strategies, i.e. they are mixed types. We can speak of predominant patterns or strategies. They change with time.

2. Linguistic (structural) type

Most languages have several different structural types for a given construction. Example: the Genitive

SUPPLETION: my house LINKER: Johns house ADPOSITION: the library of Boston LINKER + ADPOSITION: a book of Johns SUPPLETION + ADPOSITION: a book of mine

3. Content typology

Based on the structuring of the extralinguistic reality in the sentence; from more iconic to abstract.

Class Active Ergative Nominative

The direction of transition from one type into another

M. Kovatcheva 2000