Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

2. TYPOLOGY 9
a xes which incorporate several grammatical categories such asnumber,
gender and case. Also these a xes phonologically change considerably
in combination with roots. The incorporating type, also
called polysynthetic, is reserved for languages that treat verb and
object as one word.
Obviously, any given language does not adhere completely to only
one type, but uses various techniques for encoding relational meaning.
It follows that membership in a language type is a question of degree
or tendency, the most prevalent characteristic determining each language's
basic type. In other words, characterizations must be posited in
relative and not in absolute terms. A critique put forward by Spencer
(1991) claims that instead of four discrete types, there is a continuum
regarding the encoding of relational meaning in languages, so that no
basic types can be identi ed. The fact that the above types cannot be
clearly identi ed in all cases 4 led Greenberg (1954) to develop the
concept of a linguistic type. A quantitative index, like e.g. morphemes
per word, allows to rank languages relative to other languages
regarding various structural parameters.
In addition to his critique regarding distinctness of the four language
types, Spencer (1991) notes that there are many languages for
which this morphological typology is of no relevance. As an example
he cites English, which is mostly isolating regarding in ectional categories
but agglutinating regarding derivational morphology, while the
fact that English also has some compounding makes it look polysynthetic.
The question then arises of what use even an improved quantitative
classi cation of English would be if English had to be classi ed as
in ectional-agglutinative-polysynthetic. As a further problem with the
classi cation of languages as either isolating, agglutinative, in ectional,
or polysynthetic, Spencer observes that polysynthetic languages are agglutinative,
so that polysynthetic should be a subtype of agglutinative.
When considering in ectional as a special type of agglutinative, the
di erence boils down to languages having morphology and languages
lacking morphology, which is what Friedrich von Schlegel originally
suggested (von Schlegel, 1808/1977).
2.2. Investigation of cross-linguistic patterns. Besides the
typological classi cation of the languages of the world, typologists
are interested in discovering cross-linguistic patterns. Clusters of connected
properties are identi ed and used to de ne linguistic types. The
4 A main problem is where to draw the line between a small and a large number
of morphemes.