1.2　Types of linguistic Structure

　Sapir who continued to research the grammatical process of many languages in the world, classified the language concept into four types: (Ⅰ) basic concepts, (Ⅱ) derivational concepts, (Ⅲ) concrete relational concepts and (Ⅳ) pure relational concepts.
　The vertical classification (Ⅰ) is the questions concerning the translation of concepts into linguistic symbols. For example, Sapir distinguished pure-relational language (A:simple and B:
complex) from mixed-relational language (C:simple and D:complex) depending on whether the language keeps its radical concepts purely and whether the basic relational concepts are mixed with concrete concepts.
　(Ⅱ) derivational concepts affix non-radical elements to radical elements and give a radical element a particular significance. For example the word farmer has an agentive suffix –er and therefore it becomes the subject of a particular verb.
　(Ⅲ) concrete relational concepts are shown by affixing non-radical elements to radical elements, but they differ greater in the meaning of affixation than (Ⅱ) (books or depth).
　(Ⅳ) pure relational concepts interrelate concrete elements in a proposition and give a clear syntactic form (anaphora of number, gender and case). The lateral classification of table 1 is meant to sort out the concepts as expressed in language.
　Furthermore the degree of fusion and the level of synthesis join the classification. The degree of fusion is characterized by isolating, agglutinative, fusional and symbolic and the meaning is similar to sub-types in table 1. For example an agglutinative language such as Japanese affixes by juxtaposition, while a fusional and symbolic language such as Latin is defined as non-agglutinative.
　The level of synthesis is divided into analytic and synthetic. An analytic language is one that either doesn’t combine concepts into single words at all (Chinese) or does so economically (English and French). In addition, Polynesian word order is more flexible than Chinese and there is a tendency to proceed to a complicated derivation.
　In a synthetic language the concepts cluster more thickly, the words are more richly composed, but there is a tendency to keep the range of concrete significance in the single word to a moderate compass (Latin). Latin and Greek have inflection and they use the method of fusion. The fusion has an inner psychological as well as an outer phonetic meaning. (Sapir: 2002)

花村嘉英著（2015）「从认知语言学的角度浅析鲁迅作品－魯迅をシナジーで読む」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura