Grammar
There are many ways to express meaning in a language given semantic units. This is my attempt to understand the various elements and their interrelationships.
Examples of languages exhibiting the stated quality are given in [brackets], and additional information is given in (parentheses).
See Matthew Dryer's Order of subject, object, and verb
, Usama Soltan's The SVO-SOV contrast: English vs. Japanese, akerbeltz on VSO, and André Grüning's Why verb-initial languages are not so frequent
for various views and statistics on word-order typologies. Of course it is difficult to classify languages by word order, since almost all can vary them for effect or meaning; in the numbers below, languages with no apparent preference are discounted.
I prefer to seperate typologies into two axes, which allows English to be considered as an analytic language rather than a synthetic language. Of course the distinction is fine, and certainly English has a fair number of inflectional features, but compared to true
synthetic languages it has only window dressing. I'm not sure how to include incorporating/nonincorporating languages into this scheme, so I've left that distinction out.
See Justin B Rye's rant R on Esperanto for a solid explanation of the differences. I've added (sometimes invented) terminology where needed, and found examples, but the basic structure is his. I love his desciption of transitive-intransitive languages (his type C).
I'm having trouble distinguishing between split-S and mixed languages, but I believe several of the following languages are split-S: Taba, Chochotec, Amuzgo, Lakota, Ika, Kiowa, Navajo, Tobelo, and Kedang.
Lindsay J. Whaley, "Introduction to typology: The unity and diversity of language." (1997)
Other languages have much larger systems of grammatical gender, often then called noun classes
. The Bantu languages have large numbers of genders (22 in Proto-Bantu and 13–15 in Swahili). Navajo has 6 levels of animacy and 11 principal verb stems that are similar, in many respects, to gender (since they are used on different groups of nouns). Dyirbal has four genders.
Capell and Beaumont use the term quadruple
instead of quadral. Plank uses quattral
instead of quadral and ambal
instead of paral. Multal (or multitudinal) is sometimes used for plural when it contrasts with paucal.
Rick Harrison's Verb Aspect treats this in some depth. (The site appears to be down with the exception of this page, oddly; use the Internet Archive to get it back when/if it fails.)
As an alternative, indicative and possibly negative are grouped as realis and the others as irrealis.
* These are sometimes classified as aspects, but I feel they are better viewed as moods. I'm not a linguist and as such I'm not qualified to make such judgments, but this is my website.
Person: first, second, third; also proximate, obviate, generic
Voice: Passive, middle, active; also antipassive, applicative, causative, reciprocal, cooperative
Transitive/intransitive
This is a basic table of correlatives used in English. Other languages may have other categories, and English is sometimes analyzed to have many more categories and entries.
| lexical function | Interrogative | Proximal Demonstrative | Distal Demonstrative | Indefinite Quantifier | Negative Quantifier | Universal Quantifier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| adjective | Determiner | which | this/these | that/those | some | no | every |
| pronoun | Human | who(m) | this/these | that/those | someone | no one | everyone |
| Nonhuman | what | this/these | that/those | something | nothing | everything | |
| pro-adverb | Place | where | here | there | somewhere | nowhere | everywhere |
| Time | when | now | then | sometime | never | always | |
| Way | how | thus | thereby | somehow | nohow | any way | |
| Reason | why | therefore |