Affix:

An affix refers to a morpheme combined to a root to add a lexical or grammatical piece of information.

There are usually 3 main types of affixes:

The prefix, added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-happy)

The suffix, added at the end of the word (e.g. happi-ness)

The infix, added in the middle of the word.

There are also interfixes which are added between two morphemes and circumfixes, added on all sides of the root.

Numerical classifier:

In many languages, it’s impossible to directly state numbered items and a “numerical classifier” has to be added to numbers. For instance, in Chinese, we have:

sān ge rén three people

sān tóu yáng three sheep

sān zhī gāngbǐ three pens

sān zhāng zhuozi three tables

The numerical classifier ge applies for human beings, tóu for certain pets, zhī for long or cylindrical objects, zhāng for flat objects…

In reality, numerical classifiers only make up a rule for a dynamic which already exists in English, although it is still in embryonic stages. In English, certain notions are referred to as uncountable, the morphological criteria being the use of “some”. For instance, we say some water, some paper, some sugar. But in reality, we are referring to individual entities, although they are often small.

To count them, individuality must be assessed by describing the entity: three liters of water, three sheets of paper, three pieces of sugar… This is why numerical classifiers often appear in languages without grammatical numbers, meaning when words are treated as uncountable. Let’s compare the words “paper” and “pen” in English and in Chinese:

zhǐ some paper

sān zhāng zhǐ three sheets of paper

gāngbǐ a pen, pens (as if we were saying “some pens”)

sān zhī gāngbǐ three pens (as if we were saying “thee sticks of pen” on the same pattern as “three sheets of paper”)

As in English, instead of actual classifiers, we use metric units (three pounds of sugar, three meters of fabric, three liters of water…) or containers (three cups of coffee, thee glasses of water, three bags of rice…).

Note: Warning, zhǐ “paper” is different from zhǐ “classifier of long objects”, as explained before: the inflection is different.

Utterance:

There are many ways to define utterance, a concept that is often used in linguistics. To make it simple, utterance could be defined as “what a human being produces when addressing another human being”, or “a group of pronounced sounds to which a meaning can be associated”. In linguistics, this concept is associated with the definition of a sentence: a sentence is an utterance, but an utterance can have several sentences. The interjection “ouch!” isn’t a grammatical sentence, but the meaning is clear, so it is indeed an utterance. “Ouch! It hurts!” is an utterance composed of an interjection and a sentence…

Evidentials:

An evidential is an indication of the speaker’s “opinion” in an utterance. It is often used to mark the degree of proof/probability of the action.

For instance, let’s have a look at Eastern Pomo, a language from the Pomo family in North America.

The stem pʰa•békʰ means “burnt” in a perfective state. The following suffixes can be added to the stem:

pʰa•békʰ-ink’e “burnt”, as the speaker feels the burn. The final suffix marks a sensatio.

pʰa•bék-ine “[it] must have burned” ; the speaker makes a deduction based on a hint. The suffix marks a conclusion, an inference.

pʰa•békʰ-•le “they said it burned”: the speaker repeats what has been said. The suffix marks a reported sentence.

pʰa•bék-a “I know that it burned”: the speaker has direct proof. The suffix marks an unquestionable, obvious fact.

Inflections:

An inflection is when a word is modified for grammatical reasons (without changing categories, contrary to a derivation).

A typical inflection is carried out by adding grammatical affixes to a lexical or verbal root.

For instance, in French, when comparing “parlons” and “parlez”, we can easily identify the verbal root “parl-” and the suffixes “-ons” and “-ez”, respective markers of the first and second person plural.

Sometimes, the inflection of a word in a language doesn’t require the addition of a suffix or a prefix, but requires a sound change of the root such as “foot” (singular) and “feet” (plural) in English. In that case, we talk about internal inflection.

Agglutinative language:

An agglutinative language is a language where words are formed from a lexical root (substantive, verb, adjective, etc), holding the main signification, to which a certain amount of affixes (prefix, suffix and/or infix) corresponding to prepositions, pronouns, etc. are added, thus giving grammatical information. Those affixes are usually invariable and often deliver one piece of information at a time. An agglutinative language is supposed to be regular in terms of affixes.

To make things clearer, let’s have a look at Nahuatl, language of the Uto-Aztecan family in Mexico:

nimitste:tlapiyalti:lis: “I’ll make you keep things for people”, “I want you to be the guardian in other people’s interest”.

The sentence could be broken down as follows:

Ni: I (subject, 1st person singular)

mits: you (object, 2nd person singular)

te: people (human indefinite object)

tla: things (non-human indefinite object)

piya: keep (verbal root)

lti: make someone do something (causative or factitive)

li: do something for someone (applicative)

s: marker of the future tense

Note: the concepts of agglutinative and polysynthetic languages are controversial and their definitions are often considered as non-operational.

Isolating language:

A language is isolating or analytic when there are no inflections, i.e. when words can only be made out of one morpheme (morphemes and words are then the same). In theory, one morpheme only has one signification or grammatical function and it is, still in theory, syntactically independent.

For instance, let’s have a look at this Chinese sentence:

nǐ chī fàn le ma which could be translated as:

nǐ: 2nd person singular “you”

chī: “eat”

fàn: literally “cooked rice”, which is a prototype for “food”

le: final realization particle

ma: particle marker of a question

It could also be translated as “did you eat (something)?” or “have you already eaten?”.

Chinese will also say:

wǒ chī fàn le: “I’ve eaten”, where wǒ is the first person singular

tā chī fàn le: “he/she ate” with tā as the third person, and so on.

Chinese is often taken as an example when talking about isolating languages, but many more languages can be considered as such. Most of South-East Asian languages and most of creole languages also fall into this category.

Note: a language is rarely “exclusively” isolating because it often presents morphology embryos. It is in fact the case for Chinese.

Inflecting language:

An inflecting language is language where the form of words change for grammatical reasons. In terms of typology, an inflecting language is opposed to an isolating or a agglutinative language because of an inflecting morphology: stem+affix (which doesn’t exist in isolating languages), with a certain type of irregularity in the inflection (contrary to agglutinative languages).

In French: cheval (singular of “horse”) / chevaux (plural), it’s impossible to find the suffix -s, usual marker of the plural form.

One of the common characteristics of languages considered as inflecting is the dynamic of “internal inflection” where inflection doesn’t consist in adding a suffix or a prefix but requires a sound change of the stem itself.

Thus, we’ve seen cheval/chevaux in French, which is an internal inflection, but we can also consider the verbal stem sing in English, which can appear as follows (I) sing (present), (I) sang (past), sung (past participle). We can also consider the pair man (singular)/men (plural). In both cases, inflection appears through a sound change, while modifying a vowel within the stem.

Latin languages such as French are usually considered as inflecting.

Note: The limits of morphological typology of languages distinguishing agglutinative languages from inflecting and isolating languages are often very vague. Those languages should be considered as “poles” towards which the morphology of a language is headed.

As explained before, no language is “exclusively isolating”. There are always a few inflecting characteristics. On the other hand, languages considered as “agglutinative” show, by definition, an inflection, but certain characteristics are usually more regular than for languages said to be “inflecting”.

Polysynthetic language:

A polysynthetic language is a language where words are made with lexical morphemes (substantive, verb, adjective, etc) as if parts of sentences were bound together to constitute one word, which can sometimes be very long. Those “words” will be translated by several words or even by a complete sentence for less synthetic languages such as English.

For instance, in Iñupiak-inuktitut, language of the Eskimo-Aleut family in North America:

Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga means “I can’t hear very well”.

This word could be broken down as follows: the root Tusaa- (“to hear”) followed by 5 suffixes:

tsiag- (“well”), -junnag- (“to be able to”), -nngit- (negative form), -tualuu- (“a lot”), -junga (marker of the first person and present tense).

Polysynthetic languages are usually agglutinative. Note that this definition of polysynthetic languages is also controversial. If the concept of polysynthetic language (and agglutinative) is operational for languages with very long “sentence-words”, as for Iñupiak, it is often difficult to tell how polysynthetic a language is if there are no written translations.

Nowadays, this definition is often used to describe any language where words are made out of a lexical/verbal root, when syntactic functions are only marked by affixes. In that case, we could describe Basque as a polysynthetic language, although there are no “sentence-words” as long as our example.

Note: the concepts of agglutinative and polysynthetic languages are controversial and their definitions are sometimes considered as non-operational.

Morpheme:

In theory, a morpheme is the smallest contrastive unit of grammar in a given language. The notion of morpheme shouldn’t be mistaken with the word. Several morphemes can be used for one word. The french word injustement (“unfairly”) can thus be broken down to three morphemes: in- (negative prefix), juste (adjective stem, holding the main signification), -ment (adverbial derivation suffix).

On the other hand, certain words cannot be decomposed such as “steam” or “mosquito” in English. These words are only made out of one morpheme.

Generally speaking, there are two main types of morphemes: grammatical and lexical. Grammatical morphemes belong to a “closed” category, whereas lexical morphemes belong to an “open” category. For instance, if there are 2 numbers, 2 genders and 6 persons in English, it’s possible to assess the morphemes denoting those notions, but it would almost be impossible to draw up the inventory of all the nominal and verbal roots of the English language.

Morphology:

Morphology is the study of the structure of words in a given language. It focuses on how morphemes interact with each other to form words, not on how words are organized.

Phoneme:

Each language has a set of sounds and its own phonetic system, as well as several dozens of phonemes (usually between 20 and 40, although certain languages have less phonemes, – up to 15 – while others have much more – up to 70 or more). A phoneme is an abstract unit, composed of a set of sounds. In most cases, the sound and the phoneme are one and the same (the phoneme is always made the same way), but there can be variations (a phoneme can turn into two or several sounds).

For example in English, there’s a difference between a short [i] and a long [i:] to make up different words such as “sick” and “seek”. This difference is sufficient to distinguish two words or morphemes, so we can say that there are two distinct phonemes. Because the length of vowels isn’t very distinctive in French, there won’t be two different words because of the length of a vowel: in the word mine, the length of the vowel [i] has no importance, there will never be two different words. French thus has one phoneme for the sound [i], written /i/.

Phonetics:

Phonetics is the the study of sounds used in verbal communication. Sounds may be considered depending on the way they are produced by organs of articulation (referred to as articulatory phonetics) or on their physical properties (referred to as acoustic phonetics).

Phonology:

Phonology, contrary to phonetics, focuses on the way each language organizes its own phonetic system with units called phonemes.

Root:

A root is a lexical morpheme bearing the main signification of a word, when said word is made of several morphemes. It’s the smallest lexical unit which allows to formulate similar words: a French speaker will therefore notice that chat (“cat”), chaton (“kitten”) and chatière (“cat door”) are related. In the same way: juste (“fair”), injuste (“unfair”), justice, justement (“exactly”), injustice, justicier (“justiciary”), etc. In this case, the root is just(e)- to which different affixes are added to make up new words.

As for the adjective juste, certain words can only be made out of one root.

Note: the term “stem” is also used to talk about morphemes but there’s a difference between those two notions: a root is indivisible whereas the stem is opposed to grammatical affixes. For example, in “justicier”, the root is -just- but the stem is “justicier”. The words “justicier-s” and “justicièr-e” can be formed by adding suffixes marking the plural or feminine form (the latter leading to a change of the stem).

Syntax:

Syntax is the study of how different words of a language are organized to produce an utterance.