The Methodology of Quantitative Morphological-Typological Studies. Problems and Solutions

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Pages: 57-70
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/LPTV6555

Abstract:

Many of the current studies in the field of quantitative morphological linguistic typology, which are based on the work of Joseph Greenberg, face several important methodological problems: the lack of a universal and comprehensive definition of the concept ‘word’; the overly general use of the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’; the underclarified status of some word classes (e.g prepositions and conjunctions) as free grammatical markers having an impact on the index of analyticity; the potential for skewed results in the analysis and comparison of the analyticity and syntheticity levels of agglutinative and inflectional languages. This paper provides suggestions for solving or at least alleviating these problems, so that quantitative typological research at the morphological level may be more relevant and informative in the face of the high demands for precision and thoroughness in modern science.

Keywords:

quantitative typological research, analyticity, syntheticity, grammaticity, grammatical markers

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