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Morphosyntactic type as a basic characteristic of language

The first part of the report examines how to understand the "structure" of language in light of typology. Two main metaphors are critiqued: the onomatetic ("language as a set of words") and the additive ("language as a set of morphemes and the principles of their combination"). It is demonstrated that they reflect narrow and naive notions of language structure and are applicable only to a limited number of languages, and then only partially. Next, three broader approaches to describing structure are considered: elemental-combinatorial, elemental-operational, and verbal-paradigmatic, and their limited applicability is also demonstrated. The second part of the report introduces the concept of morphosyntactic type as a basic characteristic of language, reflecting the specifics of its means of expression and internal structure. In light of typology, it is proposed to distinguish three types: "limited additive," "non-concatenative," and "ad hoc morphology" (examples include Indo-European languages, Arabic, and Mohawk, respectively). Presumably, these three types reflect three different dominants in the representation of coherence in language, which takes place at the cognitive level (i.e., in the cognitive unconscious). [Completed by grant No. 22-28-01509 of the Russian Science Foundation].