Structural typology

Morphological or Typological classification deals with the classification of lan­guages according to their structural features or types IN language instead of the genealogical origin.
An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages based on the order of the verb, subject and object in a sentence into several types: SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on, languages. (English, for instance, belongs to the SVO lan­guage type.)
The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their co-occurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages which constitute language universals.
According to the Morphological classification the languages are divided into:
A. Isolating (Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc.)
Words consist of single morphemes; most words consist only of a root. Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian.
Examples in Mandarin adapted from Norman J., Chinese, Cambridge, 1988:

1. 
   (Present) Ta ch fan le. - he eats food
   
2. 
   (Past) Ta die le fan - 'He ate the food.'.
   

B. Flexional (Fusional): words consist of stem and affixes which often mark several grammatical categories simultaneously. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Russian.
C. Agglutinative: words consist of a stem and one or more clearly identifiable affixes. Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Swahili, Turkish. Examples in Estonian³⁰
1. Ta on kohvikus.
His coffee is in his house
2. Ma tulen uuest kohvikust.
I came from the new coffee house.
D. Incorporating or polysynthetic: words consist of long strings of stems and affixes, which may translate as an entire English sentence. (American Indian lan­guages: Chukchi, Aleut, Ayacucho languages of the Amazon river, etc:
Examples in Ayacucho"
Verbs can be inflected for both actor and object in different persons and number.
For Genealogical classification the basis is constituted by common elements of etic and emic sub-levels of compared languages. For typological classification the basis is constituted by language forms and ways the meaning expressed.
Typological and genealogical classifications complement each other. A special place in elaboration of the typological classification belongs to Edward Sapir.
Establishing types is not a goal, but a means to find universals and measure the degree of proximity of languages under analysis and qualify the specific structure of each.
d. Typological theory defines common linguistic notions used in linguistic typol­ogy. Typological theory is used to define language isomorphism (common features) and allomorphism (differentiating signs).