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Is there a natural language w/ no morphology (i.e. one that has neither inflectional nor derivational morphology -- in other words, no affixation whatsoever)? I've heard claims to the effect, but the (admittedly very few) candidates that I've looked at (viz. Yoruba, Cantonese, Vietnamese) still have some (either inflectional or derivational) morphology

curiousdannii
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jaam
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    How could a language have no derivational morphology? Would it supposedly just use multi-word constructions like "not X" instead of "unX", "without X" instead of "Xless", and compounds where neither part is more grammaticalized than the other? I feel like this relates to the idea of a "purely monosyllabic" language that is also often applied to certain East Asian languages, even though my impression is that most, if not all of these languages have some words of more than one syllable. – brass tacks Jul 02 '18 at 22:51
  • @sumelic It would have to be a language w/ root morphemes exclusively (but one that could, theoretically, allow compounding them to make compound words). Syllables are besides the point (they pertain to phonology not morphology) – jaam Jul 02 '18 at 23:02

2 Answers2

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Vietnamese has no affixation at all, though it does have syntax. New words can (in principle) be formed out of thin air, or borrowed from other languages: so word-formation is possible in Vietnamese, and many people equate morphology with "word-formation" (I don't: I use "morphology" only to refer to grammatical word formation). There is also reduplication, which is a kind of morphology i.e. it is in the grammar (as are ablaut, process, and prosodic-pattern means of word-formation), so Vietnamese may not be the language that you are looking for, depending on whether you really depend on "affixation" as the distinguishing criterion.

The Chadic language Angas might come a little closer to having no morphology. It has two things that are just floating tones, which appear at the end of certain phrases in certain syntactic contexts (for example, an NP before a VP, a direct object NP before an indirect object). What is being marked is a grammatical relationship between higher-level phrases, and not some property of particular words. Syntactically, this is usually treated as the concatenation of a phrase-final marker and whatever word cones before it. However, it is phonetically realized as a change in the tone of whatever precedes it. So this could simply be syntax (positioning of a marker) plus phonology (realization of a floating tone within another word), and not morphology.

In other words, it depends on what your criteria are for calling something "morphology".

user6726
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  • Thanks. By what criterion has Vietnamese no affixation? Phonological (gaps between the would-be affixes)? Here it claims some affixation in Vietnamese, so probably by a different criterion. PS. Word-formation and word-introduction (borrowing, inventing, etc.) are entirely different things, as only the former is productive (i.e. rule-based) – jaam Jul 03 '18 at 19:28
  • This is a case where diagnosing affixes as opposed to syntactic concatenations makes the difference. For example, is "dial up" a concatenation of morphemes within one word, or a concatenation of words forming some kind of phrase? Similarly, are compounds in English single words, or tight-knit syntactic collocations? That may be an old-fashioned analysis, based on the presence of a written space between the elements. – user6726 Jul 03 '18 at 19:49
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    Noyer in the paper "Vietnamese 'morphology' and the definition of word" discusses this and casts doubt on the possibility of making a meaningful distinction between syntax and morphology (which has pretty much been rejected in contemporary work) – user6726 Jul 03 '18 at 19:50
  • I don't mind using a phonological (or whatever sensible) criterion here. My question was more "are there phonological gaps"? If there are, fine, let it fall outside morphology (by this criterion). If there are not, what other criterion are you using? I also saw blanks between the written morphemes but, knowing nothing about Vietnamese phonology or ortography, I'm not sure they coincide w/ phonological gaps. Are you? – jaam Jul 03 '18 at 20:43
  • @jaam: Vietnamese is typically written with spaces between all syllables. I'm not sure what you mean by "phonological gap"; syllable division seems like it is phonological. – brass tacks Jul 05 '18 at 20:54
  • @jaam I'm not sure phonological 'gaps' are a good way to tell between words in general. For one thing, how many ms constitutes a gap? In English, we might pronounce phrases like 'which is a big deal' as something like 'whi chi za big deal' (resyllabification), but surely we don't want to use that as evidence that 'which is a' are one word. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 07:36
  • I don't speak Vietnamese and am not familiar with its structure, but many of the putative affixes and affixed words listed on that page sound a lot like they were loaned from Chinese. FWIW, I'd consider most of their Chinese counterparts (半, 可, 反, 化, 非, 超, 家, 者, 學, 師), with the exceptions of 者 and 非, as lexical roots with which one can form compounds. 者 and 非 are functional morphemes (and have been unambiguously that way since Old Chinese as far as I can tell, though 非 could also be used lexically back then), but 者 at least is more like a functional word or clitic since it attaches to phrases. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 07:46
  • So 非 is the only one I may consider a possible candidate as a prefix in modern Chinese. Of course, the Vietnamese situation is probably very different, so my comment should be taken with a grain of salt! Just figured I could mention these possible issues, since they might be relevant in Vietnamese. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 07:47
  • @WavesWashSands I agree that phonological gaps is a bad criterion. Here's a better one: A language w/out morphology may have only (1) elementary words and (2) compound words of concatenated roots (or elementary words), where "elementary word" is "a minimal unit of speech understood (though not necessarily used) outside context" (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2009.02.001) – jaam Jul 08 '18 at 23:24
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I have a feeling that this question has been asked somewhere, or maybe it's about monosyllabic languages. Anyways, while modern Mandarin Chinese is less isolating and indeed has words consisting of multiple syllables/with parts tucked on to some sort of inflectional effect (e.g. "-了" which is similar to the past tense inflection in English), the Classical Chinese is supposed to be purely isolating, i.e. each syllable in the text strictly forms a meaning unit, and there is no inflectional affixation whatsoever, if that's what you're looking for.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the oral languages of ancient China were purely isolating. Classical Chinese is more of a written form for formal documents/historical records etc. It's suggested that people could have spoken in a quite different way compared with how they wrote documents, or they could have pronounced what seems to be one character with multiple syllables, at least people of different regions. However this can hardly be corroborated.

Also note that if you're wondering about "derivational morphology", then the way new words are derived in Classical Chinese is by combining a radical with a phonetic component. IMO this is just another form of derivational morphology, however from the perspectives of linguists who view the whole radical component + phonetic component as one single "character", of course this cannot be morphology since morphology must occur across multiple characters/syllables. The whole idea of morphology is very much centered on western languages and when applied to ideographic languages there can be problems.

xji
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  • Can new words be derived that way? I had the impression that it isn't usual for new characters to be created in Chinese--in today's digital age, that seems like it would create difficulties with writing. – brass tacks Jul 06 '18 at 13:19
  • @sumelic That's why I said it's the way new characters were created in Classical Chinese. Probably didn't make it clear enough. Nowadays new words are either multi-character or new meanings added to an existing character. – xji Jul 06 '18 at 14:03
  • a) That Old Chinese had derivational morphology (which disappeared by Middle Chinese, and remains now as either separate words or tonal contrasts like 好 hao3/hao4) is pretty much the standard view, and not really 'can hardly be corroborated'. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 07:20
  • b) The point isn't whether morphology must occur across multiple characters/syllables. English -s doesn't constitute a syllable, and it's also morphology. The problem is that radicals and phonetic components aren't part of the spoken language. Written language is just a representation of spoken language, which is the focus of morphology. Literacy was not widespread until recent times, and people who spoke Chinese during all these years without knowledge of the writing system would not have knowledge of orthography and therefore of character-building concepts. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 07:21
  • @WavesWashSands What I said is that the exact pronunciations of the written Chinese characters can hardly be corroborated, especially in old Chinese. Of course that has more to do with the "monosyllabic" argument. Are you suggesting that it's widely accepted that some form of derivational morphology existed back then in spoken Chinese? That's interesting and I'd like to see some examples of it. – xji Jul 07 '18 at 11:46
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    I recommend looking at this paper: Baxter, W. H., & Sagart, L. (1998). Word formation in Old Chinese. In Packard, J.L. (Ed.), New approaches to Chinese Word Formation. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 35-75. – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 12:12
  • Some examples are: the k- prefix (**ljun-ʔ* 尹, **k-ljun* 君), causative s- (**(C-)re(ʔ)-s* 麗, **s-(C-)re(ʔ)), nominalising -s (*m-ljɨng* and **m-ljɨng-s*, both 乘; the latter is stuff like 千乘之國, though the contrast is lost in modern Mandarin). – WavesWashSands Jul 07 '18 at 12:20
  • @WavesWashSands Thanks. That's really helpful. – xji Jul 07 '18 at 20:41
  • @WavesWashSands So Middle Chinese had no morphology by my criterion above? – jaam Jul 08 '18 at 23:44