Universal 800: isolating ⇒ classifiers agglutinative v flexive ⇒ classes
Original
Languages that tend towards isolating (such as most of those in east and south-east Asia) most typically employ noun classifiers, whereas languages that are strongly agglutinative (as in Africa) or inflectional (most Indo-European tongues) prefer systems of noun classes.
Standardized
IF a language is isolating (with bound morphology lacking), THEN there tend to be noun classifiers rather than noun classes. IF there is agglutination or flexion (in languages with rich inflectional systems), THEN there tend to be noun classes rather than noun classifiers
Keywords
agglutination, flexion, isolation, classifier, noun class
Marrithiyel (Daly, Australian) is a classifying language (see criteria in Dixon 1982: 217ff). Since Dixon treats category marker concord as a diagnostic of classing rather than of classifying status, there is a potential problem. Perhaps the correlation might be “restated as being between complex morphology and concordial patterning, rather that the whole array of functional-semantic class features.” (Green 1997: 248-251)
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Dixon 1982: 219 notes: “The correlation between noun classes/classifiers and morphological type is only a statistical one”.See also #1958.