Associated professor Alimova M. Kh

Typological classification.

There are two types of classification of languages in linguistics:

1. Genealogical, which studies etic units:

concrete sounds, words, syntactic units and so on.

According to this classification languages are grouped into the families, such as Indo-European, Semitic, Altaic and so on.

2.Typological classification is introduced by several linguists who treated languages not according to their genetic backgrounds, these are W. Humboldt, E. Sapir, F. Fortunatov.

According to the opinion of these linguists languages are classified into 5 types:

• Isolated
• Agglutinated
• Inflected
• Polysynthetic
• Agglutinated - inflecled.

The main criterion for this type of classification is the means of expression of synthetic relations among words in the sentence. According to their relations among the words in the sentence they may use different means, for example, inflections, function words, intonation, word order, sound interchange, stress and so on.

Isolated type of languages is characterized by the absence of inflections and affixal morphemes expressing the relationship among the words in the sentence. This type includes ancient Chinese and some other languages.

It is characterized by the following features:
a) words are unchangeable
b) word formation is less developed
c) the main signal of grammar is word order
d) intonation may form new words and express grammatical meanings
e) words are not distributed into parts of speech

While speaking about isolating type of languages we mean that the root of the word may express both the lexical and grammatical meanings. This type of languages have no grammatical suffixes and word order expresses syntactic relations among the words in the sentence.