[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Wayne Leman wrote:

> 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

Well, I guess there's no sense in arguing about terminology, but...I
think the definition is bad.  (And I suspect the wiki definition relied
in part on the SIL one.)  I don't have access to Tom Payne's book, but
you'll notice that the example the SIL definition gives, from Payne's
book, shows incorporation.

>>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?

You have a good point there.  The boundaries are fuzzy between
"lexically rich morphemes" and nouns.  With another typological term,
noun classifiers, I think there is very clearly a cline from classifiers
to gender systems.  Probably the same is true of the agglutination-
or-fusion-to-polysynthesis range, as you suggest, although I confess I'm
much less familiar with polysynthesis.  (And of course that means that
my disagreement with the above SIL definition is partly a matter of
degree.  But I still strongly disagree with the statement in the
LinguaLinks definition--not quoted above--that agglutination and fusion
are types of polysynthesis.  Ah, well, de defitionem non disputandem.)

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


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