[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Wayne Leman]

> 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.

from Payne, page 27, Synthesis section:

"The index of  *synthesis* (Comrie 1989) has to do with how many morphemes
tend to occur per word. This index defines a continuum from *isolating*
languages at one extreme to highly *polysynthetic* languages at the  other.
A strictly isolating language is one in which every word consists of only
one morpheme. The Chinese languages come close to this extreme. A highly
polysynthetic languages is one in which words tend to consist of several
morphemes." [NB: no mention of noun incorp]

Payne did his graduate work at UCLA when functionalism was coming into vogue
there and elsewhere, with a typical emphasis on clines, rather than
categoriality. Baker continues the Chomskyan tradition of working with
discrete categories.

>
> >>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.

Correct, and Algonquian languages have many morphemes which are lexically
rich but act almost like classifiers, for example body part medials and
kinds of intruments by which action is done. Word construction is highly
productive with these "incorporated" forms (most of which have little formal
resemblance to nouns with which they are semantically related), whereas noun
incorporation is much more limited in Alg. languages.

>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.)

Indeed!

And let us return to discussing ways of displaying in dictionaries forms
from agglutinative and polysythetic languages in ways which users of such
dictionaries find intuitively transparent. There is surely something
intuitively "transparent" about how words are constructed by the native
speakers of such languages. It should be possible to construct dictionaries
which can key into such cognitive processing.

Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language

>
> --
> Mike Maxwell
> Linguistic Data Consortium



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