Abstract
This article describes the typological status of verbal inflection, based on Agglutination Hypothesis, in the Larestani Language. According to this approach, although the well-known morphological typology of languages ( Isolating, Inflectional, Agglutinating) have been criticized as empty, the old idea that there are (predominantly) agglutinating and (predominantly) fusional languages in fact makes two implicit predictions. First agglutination/fusion is a characteristic of whole languages rather than individual constructions; second, the various components of agglutination/ fusion correlate with each other. To explore this hypothesis, at first a descriptive analysis of verbal categories of verb (tense, person, number, mood, aspect, infinitive, negation and imperative markers ) in Larestani is provided and then the accuracy of this hypothesis is tested. The overall result of this study are mostly negative. The evidence that different types of verbal inflections tend to behave alike, which would have been expected if the correlation one existed, is not overwhelming and also no significant correlation among different indexes of agglutination and fusion are attested.
References
Anderson, Stephen R (1985). Typological distinctions in word formation. In: Shopen,Timothy (ed.). Language Typology and Syntactic description, Vol3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3-56
Baker, Mark. 1996. The polysynthesis parameter. New York: Oxford Univ. Press-
Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2005. "Inflectional synthesis of the verb.“In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 94-97.
Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. New York: Holt & Co.
Booij, G (2005). The Grammar of the Words, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Bauer, Laurie. 1988. Introducing linguistic morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph (1974). Language typology: a historical and analytic overvie .TheHague: Mouton.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1954 [1960]. “A quantitative approach to the morphological
typology of language.” In: Method and Perspective in Anthropology: Papers in
Honor of Wilson D. Wallis, ed. by Robert F. Spencer, pp. 192-220.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Reprinted in: International
Journal of American Linguistics 26 (1960): 178-94.]
Haspelmath, M(2002). Understanding Morphology, London,Arnold.
Haspelmath,M (2009). An Empirical Test of the Agglutination Hypothesis, Springer Link, www. link.springer.com
Hjelmslev, Louis. 1963. Sproget: En introduktion. København: Berlingske Forlag.
(Dt. Die Sprache. Darnstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1968)
Sapir, Edvard (1970)[1920]. Language, New York
Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stump,G,T(2001). Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Testelets, Yakov G. 2001. “Russian works on linguistic typology in the
1960s-1990s”, in: Haspelmath, Martin et al. (eds) Language typology and
Languageuniversals: An international handbook. Berlin: de Gruyter, 306-323.
Vance, Timothy J( 1987). An introduction to Japanese phonology. Albany: SUNY Press.
)