LINB13H3 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Polysynthetic Language, Synthetic Language, Mohawk Language
11 Aug 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
In this article baker discusses polysynthetic languages and how they are formed and how they relate to synthetic languages. He takes the mohawk language for the polysynthetic example and compares it to english which is a synthetic language. Synthetic languages if they change words to express agreement such as in english. In a polysynthetic language any and all agreement is attached to the verb. This creates elaborate words that account for sentences in. Baker explains that polysynthetic languages despite being esthetically different from synthetic languages have a lot of commonalities. For example; polysynthetic languages are no configurational and therefore don"t follow a set syntactic pattern as in english. The subject and object don"t have to appear in strict order. For example noun incorporation i present in both types of languages. In both english and mohawk the speakers can freely make novel noun incorporations which are easily understood by other speakers of the language.
