[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Wayne Leman]

>
> I believe the traditional (among linguists) definition of polysynthesis
> is that it involves incorporation of lexical items into verbs.

Mike, since posting my message about the definition of "polysynthesis" I
have done a lot of searching on the Internet for how others define it. There
are a number of places where linguists simply define polysynthesis as,
essentially, long words composed of many morphemes, e.g.:

www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/
WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm

There are, later, it appears, definitions which say that polysynthesis often
involves incorporation of nouns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language

Finally, there are Baker et al. who come close to saying, if not actually
saying, that polysynthesis requires incorporation of nouns:

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/trask.pdf

> A
> language which just has long sequences of affixes attached to verbs (or
> nouns etc.) is called agglutinative.

True, but what of languages which have words with long sequences of
lexically rich morphemes (not simply affixes) but not necessarily having
noun incorporation?

I suggest that, as in many other areas of language, the categorical
distinctions and labels are inadequate for language realities. At a minimum,
I think we need to recognize degrees of polysynthesis, analyticity, etc.

>  A language which typically has
> just one affix per verb or noun, but where that affix represents a
> number of disparate morphosyntactic features, is called inflectional or
> fusional (I prefer the latter term, because it seems less confusing, but
> not everyone listens to me :-)).  Typical IndoEuropoean languages are
> fusional.  Turkish, Finnish, Quechua etc. are agglutinative.  And then
> of course there are isolating languages, like Vietnamese.
>
> This traditional typology is problematic in many ways.  In terms of
> polysynthesis, it is (IMO) particularly problematic in that it looks at
> a particular set of categories (nouns incorporated into verbs), while
> ignoring something which at least on the surface looks very similar,
> namely noun-noun compounding.  (Bill Poser also mentioned incorporation
> of postpositions into verbs.)
>
> I should also add that there is widespread disagreement on the borders
> of polysynthesis.  For many languages, including "Greenlandic" (about
> which Jerry Sadock has written a lot), there is (if I recall correctly)
> a limited set of "things" that can be incorporated.  Some of these
> "things" are more or less clearly nouns, while others might be
> phonologically reduced nouns, and still others might once have been
> nouns etymologically speaking.  Linguists disagree on whether to call
> such languages polysynthetic (and whether the issue is terminological or
> contentful).  I suppose one could also look at this as a sort of
> extended gender agreement system.  As I say, the boundaries are fuzzy...

Very true.

FWIW, Cheyenne is polysynthetic because it does have some noun
incorporation, but not all nouns can be incorporated and there is a limited
set of verbs into which nouns can be incorporated. Typologically, this
limited amount of noun incorporation seems to be more common than languages
that have a high degree of productive noun incorporation.

Thanks for your response,
Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language

>
> --
> Mike Maxwell
> Linguistic Data Consortium



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