[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Wayne Leman wrote:

> Thanks, Melissa, for this post. I was beginning to think that my longtime
> understanding of polysynthesis was incorrect. In layman (or Leman, if one
> prefers!!) terms, I just thought polysynthesis referred to languages that
> have "long" words typically made up of many morphemes. My understanding
> might be a bit too simplistic, but I didn't think it was necessary to have
> specific categories of derivation, for instance, incorporation, before a
> language would be considered polysythetic. I suspect that this is a case of
> a linguistic term taking on a narrower semantic focus within a specific
> linguistic framework.

I believe the traditional (among linguists) definition of polysynthesis
is that it involves incorporation of lexical items into verbs.  A
language which just has long sequences of affixes attached to verbs (or
nouns etc.) is called agglutinative.  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...

--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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