Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Classificational category of languages established by von Humboldt (1836) based on morphological criteria. In inflectional languages, the morphemes tend formally towards fusion (i.e. they influence and are influenced by adjoining morphemes); functionally they tend towards polysemy (i.e. one morpheme corresponds to more than one meaning or semantic feature). In contrast to agglutinating languages, an exact segmentation of root and derivational morpheme is not always possible. Many Indo-European and Semitic languages are inflectional languages, e.g. Lithuanian: draug-as ‘friend (nom. sg.),’ drarug-o ‘friend (gen.
sg.),’ draũg-ui ‘friend (dat. sg.),’ draug-è ‘friend (loc. sg.),’ draug-aĩ ‘friend (nom. pl.),’ draug-ũ ‘friend (gen. pl.),’ draug-áms ‘friend (dat. pl.),’ draug-uosè ‘friend (loc. pl.)’
References
Humboldt, W.von 1836. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues. Berlin. (Repr. 1963.)
language typology
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