Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.
Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.
Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement, although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque, Hungarian and Georgian, also have it. Some authors apply the term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking, or those that frequently use noun incorporation.
Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix.
At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas. Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs.
The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation, a defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas. This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas, Australia, Siberia, and New Guinea; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with the work of Edward Sapir, who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common.
Meaning
The word "polysynthesis" is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together".In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes. In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have a high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes, including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages, and the word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words".
Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb is usually only marked for agreement with the subject, but in many languages verbs also agree with the object.
Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.
Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into the verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit.
Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking the head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words.
Examples
An example from Chukchi, a polysynthetic, incorporating, and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages:From Classical Ainu of Japan, another polysynthetic, incorporating, and agglutinating language:
The Mexican language Nahuatl is also considered to be polysynthetic, incorporating and agglutinating. The following verb shows how the verb is marked for subject, patient, object, and indirect object:
The Australian language Tiwi is also considered highly polysynthetic:
And the Iroquoian language Mohawk:
An example from Western Greenlandic, an exclusively suffixing polysynthetic language:
History of the concept
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau on Native American languages
The term "polysynthesis" was first used by Peter Stephen DuPonceau in 1819 as a term to describe the structural characteristics of American languages:The term was made popular in a posthumously published work by Wilhelm von Humboldt, and it was long considered that all the indigenous languages of the Americas were of the same type. Humboldt considered language structure to be an expression of the psychological stage of evolution of a people, and since Native Americans were considered uncivilized, polysynthesis came to be seen as the lowest stage of grammatical evolution, characterized by a lack of rigorous rules and clear organization known in European languages. Duponceau himself had argued that the complex polysynthetic nature of American languages was a relic of a more civilized past, and that this suggested that the Indians of his time had degenerated from a previous advanced stage. Duponceau's colleague Albert Gallatin contradicted this theory, arguing rather that synthesis was a sign of a lower cultural level, and that while the Greek and Latin languages were somewhat synthetic, Native American languages were much more so – and consequently polysynthesis was the hallmark of the lowest level of intellectual evolution.
This view was still prevalent when linguist William Dwight Whitney wrote in 1875. He considered polysynthesis to be a general characteristic of American languages, but he did qualify the statement by mentioning that certain languages such as Otomi and the Tupi-Guarani languages had been claimed to be basically analytic.
D. G. Brinton
The ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton, the first professor of anthropology in the US, followed Duponceau, Gallatin and Humboldt in seeing polysynthesis, which he distinguished from incorporation, as a defining feature of all the languages of the Americas. He defined polysynthesis in this way:In the 1890s the question of whether polysynthesis could be considered a general characteristic of Native American languages became a hotly contested issue as Brinton debated the question with John Hewitt. Brinton, who had never done fieldwork with any indigenous group continued to defend Humboldt and Duponceau's view of the exceptional nature of American languages against the claim of Hewitt, who was half Tuscarora and had studied the Iroquoian languages, that languages such as the Iroquois had grammatical rules and verbs just like European languages.
Edward Sapir's morphological types
reacted to the prevailing view in Americanist linguistics which considered the languages of the Americas to belong to a single basic polysynthetic type, arguing instead that American indigenous languages were highly diverse and encompassed all known morphological types. He also built on the work of Leonard Bloomfield who in his 1914 work Language dismissed morphological typology, stating specifically that the term polysynthetic had never been clearly defined.In Sapir's 1921 book also titled Language, he argued that instead of using the morphological types as a strict classification scheme it made more sense to classify languages as relatively more or less synthetic or analytic, with the isolating and polysynthetic languages in each of the extremes of that spectrum. He also argued that languages were rarely purely of one morphological type, but used different morphological strategies in different parts of the grammar.
Sapir introduced a number of other distinctions according to which languages could be morphologically classified, and proposed combining them to form more complex classifications. He proposed classifying languages both by the degree of synthesis, classifying languages as either analytic, synthetic or polysynthetic, and by the technique used to achieve synthesis, classifying languages as agglutinative, fusional, or symbolic. Among the examples of polysynthetic languages he gave was Haida which he considered to use the agglutinative-isolating technique, Yana and Nootka both of which he considered agglutinative, Chinook and Algonkin which he considered fusional. The Siouan languages he considered "mildly polysynthetic" and agglutinative-fusional.
Following Sapir's understanding of Polysynthesis, his student Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed a distinction between oligosynthetic and polysynthetic languages, where the former term was applied to languages with a very small number of morphemes of which all other lexical units are composed. No language has been shown to fit the description of an oligosynthetic language and the concept is not in general use in linguistics.