Typological problems of morphological level. The problem of typological categorization

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LECTURE 6. TYPOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF 
MORPHOLOGICAL LEVEL. THE PROBLEM OF 
TYPOLOGICAL CATEGORIZATION. 
Key points for discussion: 
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The object of Morphological Typology 
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Correlation of Morphological Typology with other branches of 
СomparativeTypology 
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Morpheme and allomorph. 
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The notion of analytical and synthetic languages 
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Typological classification of languages 
Key words: 
Morphological typology, typological classification, 
synthetic relations, grammatical categories, parts of speech 
Morphological typology studies the units of the morphological level. It deals with 
two types of comparison: 
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morphological or typological classification of languages; 
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Parts of speech and their grammatical categories. 
According to the morphological classification, the languages are classified due to 
the typical structural features or means of expression of synthetic relations 
between words. 
Grammatical categories may be of 2 types: 
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primary grammatical categories, which deal with parts of speech 
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secondary grammatical categories, which deal with grammatical categories 
within every part of speech separately: number, case, gender for nouns, tense, 
voice, aspect, mood, person, degrees of comparison for adjectives and so on. 
Besides morphological typology studies morphological paradigm. It classifies 
languages into languages: 
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with highly developed morphology 
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with less developed morphology 
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with non-developed morphology 
A morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound 
pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only 
as for constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may 
consist of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful 
units. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful 
language unit. 
The term morpheme is derived from Gr morphe ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek 
suffix -erne has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or 
distinctive unit. (Cf. phoneme, sememe.) The morpheme is the smallest meaningful 
unit of form. A form in these cases is a recurring discrete unit of speech. 
A form is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; 
if not, it is a bound form, so called because it is always bound to something else. 
For example, if we compare the words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see 
that sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg-, -ive, -
ant are bound forms because they never occur alone. 
Morphological typology 

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Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that 
groups languages according to their common morphological structures. First 
developed by brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel, the field 
organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by 
combining morphemes. Two primary categories exist to distinguish all languages: 
analytic languages and synthetic languages, where each term refers to the opposite 
end of a continuous scale including all the world's languages.