ABSTRACT
The term morphology entered the technical vocabulary of linguistics around 1860, having been imported from biology, where it was first used around 1820 to refer to the structure of organisms (Dixon, 2010a, p. 138). The roughly 6,000 languages of the world differ tremendously in the extent to which they employ morphological processes (Haspelmath & Sims, 2010). At one extreme, there are highly analytic languages that use almost no such processes, so that virtually every word is a single morpheme-that is,
an isolated, minimal pairing of form of meaning. One of the most commonly spoken languages on the planet, Mandarin Chinese, operates this way. At the other extreme, there are highly synthetic languages that use morphological processes quite extensively, so that intricate ideas are frequently encoded as long words composed of many parts. A good example is Greenlandic Eskimo, in which the single word angya-ghlla-ng-yug-tuq means roughly “He wants to acquire a big boat” and is translated literally, morpheme by morpheme, as “boat-augmentativeacquire-desiderative-3singular” (Comrie, 1989, p. 45; see also Box 13.1). Not suprisingly, most languages fall somewhere between these two extremes of morphological complexity. For instance, Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian lie toward the middle of the continuum, with verbs coming in myriad forms marked for several grammatical features, most notably person (first, second, or third), number (singular or plural), tense (present, past, or future), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, or conditional). Such systems may strike many monolingual English speakers as being very complex, rather than just moderately complex, but that is only because English morphology turns out to be fairly rudimentary, occupying a place on the continuum that’s somewhat closer to Mandarin Chinese than to Spanish and Italian.
