THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ISOLATING (AMORPHIC) LANGUAGES: A THEORETICAL AND CONTRASTIVE STUDY

This thesis examines the main linguistic features of isolating (amorphic) languages, which are characterized by minimal morphological complexity and a predominance of free morphemes. Unlike agglutinative or fusional languages, isolating languages convey grammatical relations primarily through word order, function words, and contextual cues rather than through affixation or inflection. Each word typically corresponds to a single morpheme, and grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, number, and case are expressed syntactically rather than morphologically.