Тенденцията към аналитизъм – определение, метод за измерване, причини, следствия

It may be assumed that the degree of analyticity of a certain language corresponds to the average value of grammatical information, carried by the word forms of this language. The paper discusses a method for working out the average value of grammatical information carried by a word form. It is pointed out that the tendency towards analyticity might bring the reduction in the number of substantival categories, but it does preserve and even increases the number of verbal categories. Agglutinative languages distribute the grammatical information among a great number of morphemes. Inflectional languages, on the contrary, focus whole chunks of in- formation on a single morpheme – the inflexion. The development towards analyticity results in the situation where, in a similar way, information begins to be transmitted and received by formally autonomous parts. Thus, the very nature of inflexion carries the starting point of the tendency towards analyticity. The analytic organization of a language, however, preserves the maximum autonomy and the distinctive character of word classes, characteristic of inflectional languages.