In Turkish, the word 'ev-ler-im-den' (meaning 'from my houses') stacks suffixes so that each one adds exactly one meaning: plural, possessive, ablative. Which morphological type does this exemplify?
AIsolating
BFusional
CAgglutinative
DPolysynthetic
Agglutinative languages string morphemes together transparently, with each morpheme contributing one grammatical meaning and clear boundaries between them. Turkish is a textbook example. Isolating languages (like Mandarin) use one morpheme per word with little inflection. Fusional languages (like Latin) fuse multiple grammatical meanings into a single morpheme — a Latin verb ending might simultaneously encode tense, person, and number with no way to separate them. Polysynthetic languages (like many indigenous North American languages) incorporate noun phrases into verbs to form very long, sentence-like words.
Question 2 True / False
Because SOV is the most common word order across the world's languages, linguists conclude it is the most cognitively natural order for humans.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Frequency does not equal cognitive naturalness. SOV's dominance partly reflects demographic and historical contingencies — large SOV-dominant language families (such as Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian, and Altaic) have many speakers and languages, inflating the count. Whether any word order is more 'natural' is a separate empirical question requiring psycholinguistic evidence, and results are mixed. A core lesson of typology is that frequency is data, but interpretations of that data must be argued, not assumed.
Question 3 Short Answer
What is a typological correlation, and give one example that illustrates why such correlations are theoretically interesting?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: A typological correlation is a statistical tendency for two or more structural features to co-occur across languages more often than chance would predict. For example, SOV languages tend to use postpositions (case markers after the noun) rather than prepositions. This is interesting because it suggests underlying principles — perhaps a preference for head-final structures throughout the grammar — rather than arbitrary cross-linguistic variation.
Typological correlations move typology beyond mere classification toward explanation. If features cluster together, there may be cognitive, processing, or historical pressures driving the pattern. Greenberg's 1963 universals paper launched this research program by identifying dozens of such implicational universals — statements of the form 'if a language has feature X, it tends to also have feature Y.'