At face value, morphological difference is one of the most glaring differences among languages. Without deeper investigation, language universals can be easily dismissed as void. Every language seems to possess a combinatorial system for morphemes that is not exactly the same as the other language – especially one that comes from another language family. This combinatorial principle, a hallmark of human language, leads to the complex nature of morphological processes and structure. Additionally, the complexity of each morphological structure varies and this is mirrored by the difference which spans from grammatical organisation of morphemes to how they are stored as lexical entries (Evans & Levinson, 2009). Proponents of language universals postulate that language differences can be analysed through a more abstract investigation which would render these differences to be negligible. However, critics are adamant about leaving these differences as they are in light of language diversity (Evans & Levinson, 2009).
Canonical language types
At word level, the difference in how a word is formed can be broadly categorised into three: isolating, agglutinating, and fusional. For isolating language type, there appears to be one-to-one agreement between the words and morphemes. The languages which come close to the isolating type is Vietnamese and Chinese. Meanwhile, in agglutinating language, a word is usually made up of more than one morphemes. These morphemes are distinctive and have consistent forms. A close example would be Turkish. For fusional language, there is no well-defined boundaries between morphemes. A word consists of unsegmented morphemes of different grammatical and verbal categories such as Russian.
However, it would be erroneous to simplistically categorise languages of the world into these language types. Majority of the world’s languages do not conform specifically to one of these. Instead, they “fall between the two extremes on each of the indices of synthesis and fusion.” (Comrie,1989) Index of synthesis refers to the number of morphemes per word while index of fusion refers to number of grammatical categories per morpheme.
Affixes
In every scientific research including one that relates to language, there is an intrinsic need to search for general laws in the construction of languages. Researchers would then look into extending these laws to its widest possible scope.(Van Der Hulst,2008 ) These laws come in the form of universals where they are claimed to exist at the “deeper levels of analysis and theorising” (Van Der Hulst, 2008). However, the extent to which universals can be applied remain unanswered. Among the substantive universals that are claimed to be applicable to all languages include Verb Affixes (Pinker & Bloom,1990). This claim is immediately counteract by the fact that it does not hold true for all languages. For instance, Mandarin and Malay languages do not mark tense and many spoken languages such as German lack aspect.
Lexical distinctions
In defence of Language Universals, Tallerman (2009) postulates that “examining languages more closely, or at a higher level of abstraction often reveals critical similarities which superficial descriptions can obscure.”
This is highlighted in the example of the Wakashan languages, Nuuchahnult. (Tallerman, 2009) In this language, nominal and verbal roots are not easily distinguishable by morphology. In addition, lexical roots including nouns can take verbal inflectional morphology thus superficially postulating the absence of noun and verb distinction. A deeper level of analysis however, reveals that there is a behavioural differences between inflections on noun and verb . For instance, proper names cannot take on third singular indicative verbal inflection -maa as illustrated below:
1. mamuuk-maa quuʔas-ʔi
work-3s:INDIC man-the
“The man is working.”
2. quuʔas-maa mamuuk- ʔi
man-3s:INDIC work-the
“The working one is a man”
3. *Jack-maa
Jack-3s:INDIC
(“He is Jack.”)
In another part of inflection, the suffix –(m)it applies on both nouns and verb. However, this past tense marker in Nuuchanult conveys the exact meaning of “former” for proper names (4) but it simply indicates past tense when inflected on verbal predicate (5).
4. mamuuk-(m)it -(m)aħ
work-PAST-1s.INDIC
“I was working.”
5. ʔuunuu ʔani ʔuumiik-(m)it-qa
because that whaler-PAST-SUBORDINATE
“because he was a former whaler”
Nuuchanult language highlights Tallerman’s argument that language universals may not be evident at face value. It takes careful investigation to draw out similar features between languages. (Evans & Levinson, 2009) claim that not all language distinguish their major lexical categories; nouns, verbs, adjectives. But the above examples suggest a flaw in their claims. Perhaps other languages that are seemingly invariant in lexical categories may reveal these distinctions through a careful morphological analysis.