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In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word ''tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq'' which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of the morphemes ''tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq'' with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative; and except for the morpheme ''tuntu'' "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Some authors apply it to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, whilst others use it for languages that are highly head-marking, or those that frequently use noun incorporation. At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages). The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, who considered polysynthesis — as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation — a defining feature of all Native American languages. This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas, Australia, Siberia, and Papua New Guinea—though there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with the work of Edward Sapir, who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology, since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. ==Meaning== The word "polysynthesis" is composed of the Greek roots ''poly'' meaning "many" and ''synthesis'' meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes. In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have a high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages, and the word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish ''hablo'' "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word ''nakupenda'' "I love you" where the ''n-'' prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ''ku''- prefix marks agreement with a second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word ''tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq'' which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of the morphemes ''tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq'' with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme ''tuntu'' "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into the verb word, as ''baby'' is incorporated in the English verb ''babysit''. Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking the head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Polysynthetic language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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