Chapter 9
Morphology

Assignment 5

At the outset of Section 9.2, we asked the question to which morphological type sign languages could belong. However, we did not provide an answer. What do you think? Does the sign language you know belong to the isolating, agglutinating, fusional, or polysynthetic type? Or is the typology proposed for spoken languages not applicable to your sign language?

This is really intended as a discussion exercise in order to recap on the definitions of the different types of languages. It can be useful to consider examples from your own sign language of the four different types of morphology (if they exist) and then to discuss what is most common in your sign language.

It is, for instance, likely that your sign language displays characteristics of isolating languages, as e.g. tense is not marked on the verb (e.g. yesterday index1 book buy), but it is unlikely that the system as a whole is of the isolating type, as there are probably numerous instances of morphologically complex signs. Sometimes, the common simultaneous realization of morphemes is taken to be an instance of fusional morphology. The fact whether this is appropriate could be discussed. Remember that fusional implies that the morphemes cannot be separated, i.e. one form conveys two meaning components. Is this true in sign languages? Probably, more often than not, specific meaning components can be related unambiguously to specific form components (e.g. a handshape, a location). If every morpheme can be identified and carries a specific meaning, than the system might be closer to an agglutinative system, despite its simultaneity. (Note that there is nothing in the definition of agglutinative that requires sequential organization of morphemes.)