Rasgos del español como lengua analítica

Abstract

Current typological classifications oflanguages still follow that of A. Schlegel (1818) based on relevant morphological features. Thisclassification divided languages into three major groups: inflecting, agglutinative and isolating.The latter was considered ‘analytic’ whereas the previous two were classified as ‘synthetic’. Thisclassification, however widespread, has serious shortcomings: it hides important differences between languages belonging to the same group, for morphological criteria do not necessarilyreveal the constructive tendencies of a language. For this reason, in this paper, I will use syntactic criteria to distinguish constructive tendencies in Spanish and English, according to which theformer should be classified as analytic and the latter as synthetic