Inlinguistics,agglutination is amorphological process in which words are formed by stringing togethermorphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a singlesyntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are calledagglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language ofTurkish, the wordevlerinizden ("from your houses") consists of the morphemesev-ler-i-n-iz-den. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted withisolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, andfusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.
Although agglutination is characteristic of certain language families, this does not mean that when several languages in a certain geographic area are all agglutinative they are necessarily related phylogenetically. In the past, this assumption led linguists to propose the so-calledUral–Altaic language family, which included the Uralic and Turkic languages, as well as Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese. Contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial,[1] and some refer to this as alanguage convergence instead.
Another consideration when evaluating the above proposal is that some languages that developed from agglutinative proto-languages lost their agglutinative features. For example, contemporary Estonian has shifted towards the fusional type.[2] (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such asvowel harmony.)
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Examples of agglutinative languages include theUralic languages, such asFinnish,Estonian, andHungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed byadpositions in WesternIndo-European languages is typically found in suffixes.
Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost every part of it. The suffixes follow each other in special order based on the role of the suffix, and many can be heaped, one upon the other, resulting in words conveying complex meanings in compacted forms. An example isfiaiéi, where the root "fi(ú)-" means "son", the subsequent four vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means "[plural properties] belong to his/her sons". The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals are quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders).
Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns. Persian is an SOV language, thus having a head-final phrase structure.[3] Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + postposition suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example, the phrase "Mashinhayeshan-ra negah mikardam/ماشینهایشان را نگاه میکردم" meaning 'I was looking at their cars' lit. '(at their cars) (look) (I was doing)'. Breaking down the first word:
ماشین(car)+(ها(ی(plural suffix)+شان(possessive suffix)+را(post-positional suffix)
We can see its agglutinative nature and the fact that Persian is able to affix a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme (in this example, car).
Almost allAustronesian languages, such asMalay, and mostPhilippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The Indonesian and Malay wordmempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and benefactive affixes to the compound verbtanggung jawab, which means "to account for". InTagalog (and its standardised register,Filipino),nakakapágpabagabag ("that which is upsetting/disturbing") is formed from the rootbagabag ("upsetting" or "disquieting").
InEast Asia,Korean is an agglutinating language. Its uses of '조사', '접사', and '어미' makes Korean agglutinate. They representtense,time,number, causality, and honorific forms.
Japanese is also an agglutinating language, like Korean, adding information such asnegation, passivevoice, pasttense,honorific degree and causality in the verb form. Common examples would behatarakaseraretara (働かせられたら), which combines causative, passive or potential, and conditional conjugations to arrive at two meanings depending on context "if (subject) had been made to work..." and "if (subject) could make (object) work", andtabetakunakatta (食べたくなかった), which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean "I/he/she/they did not want to eat".
Turkish, along with all otherTurkic languages, is another agglutinating language: as an extreme example, the expressionMuvaffakiyetsizleştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as "as if you were of those we would not be able to turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones". The "-siniz" refers to plural form of you with "-sin" being the singular form, the same way "-im" being "I" ("-im" means "my" not "I". The original editor must have mistaken it for "-yim". This second suffix is used as such "Oraya gideyim" meaning "May I go there" or "When I get there") and "-imiz" making it become "we". Similarly, this suffix means "our" and not "we".
Tamil is agglutinative. For example, in Tamil, the word "அதைப்பண்ணமுடியாதவர்களுக்காக" (ataippaṇṇamuṭiyātavarkaḷukkāka) means "for the sake of those who cannot do that", literally "that to do impossible he [plural marker] [dative marker] to become". Another example is verb conjugation. In all Dravidian languages, verbal markers are used to convey tense, person, and mood. For example, in Tamil, "சாப்பிடுகிறேன்" (cāppiṭukiṟēṉ, "I eat") is formed from the verb rootசாப்பிடு- (cāppiṭu-, "to eat") + the present tense marker-கிற்- (-kiṟ-) + the first-person singular suffix-ஏன் (-ēṉ).
Agglutination is also a notable feature ofBasque. The conjugation of verbs, for example, is done by adding different prefixes or suffixes to the root of the verb:dakartzat, which means "I bring them", is formed byda (indicates present tense),kar (root of the verbekarri → bring),tza (indicates plural) andt (indicates subject, in this case, "I"). Another example would be the declension:Etxean = "In the house" whereetxe = house.
Agglutination is used very heavily in mostNative Americanlanguages, such as theInuit languages,Nahuatl,Mapudungun,Quechua,Tz'utujil,Kaqchikel,Cha'palaachi andKʼicheʼ, where one word can contain enoughmorphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complexsentence in other languages. Conversely,Navajo contains affixes for some uses, but overlays them in such unpredictable and inseparable ways that it is often referred to as a fusional language.[citation needed]
As noted above, it is a typical feature of agglutinative languages that there is a one-to-one correspondence between suffixes and syntactic categories. For example, a noun may have separate markers for number, case, possessive or conjunctive usage etc. The order of these affixes is fixed;[note 1] so we may view any given noun or verb as a stem followed by several inflectional and derivational "slots", i.e. positions in which particular suffixes may occur, and/or preceded by several "slots" for prefixes. It is often the case that the most common instance of a given grammatical category is unmarked, i.e. the corresponding affix is empty.
The number of slots for a given part of speech can be surprisingly high. For example, a finiteKorean verb has seven slots (the innerround brackets indicate parts of morphemes which may be omitted in some phonological environments):[4]
Moreover, passive and causative verbal forms can be derived by adding suffixes to the base, which could be seen as the null-th slot.
Even though some combinations of suffixes are not possible (e.g. only one of the aspect slots may be filled with a non-empty suffix), over 400 verb forms may be formed from a single base. Here are a few examples formed from the word rootga 'to go'; the numbers indicate which slots contain non-empty suffixes:
Although most agglutinative languages in Europe and Asia are predominantly suffixing, theBantu languages of eastern and southern Africa are known for a highly complex mixture of prefixes, suffixes and reduplication. A typical feature of this language family is that nouns fall into noun classes. For each noun class, there are specific singular and plural prefixes, which also serve as markers of agreement between the subject and the verb. Moreover, the noun determines prefixes of all words that modify it and subject determines prefixes of other elements in the same verb phrase.
For example, theSwahili nouns-toto ("child") and-tu ("person") fall into class 1, with singular prefixm- and plural prefixwa-. The noun-tabu ("book") falls into class 7, with singular prefixki- and plural prefixvi-.[5] The following sentences may be formed:
|
|
|
yu-le
1SG-that
m-tu
1SG-person
m-moja
1SG-one
m-refu
1SG-tall
a-li
1SG-he-past
y-e
7SG-REL-it
ki-soma
7SG-read
ki-le
7SG-that
ki-tabu
7SG-book
ki-refu
7SG-long
yu-le m-tu m-moja m-refu a-li y-e ki-soma ki-le ki-tabu ki-refu
1SG-that 1SG-person 1SG-one 1SG-tall 1SG-he-past 7SG-REL-it 7SG-read 7SG-that 7SG-book 7SG-long
'That one tall person who read that long book.'
wa-le
1PL-that
wa-tu
1PL-person
wa-wili
1PL-two
wa-refu
1PL-tall
wa-li
1PL-he-past
(w)-o
7PL-REL-it
vi-soma
7PL-read
vi-le
7PL-that
vi-tabu
7PL-book
vi-refu
7PL-long
wa-le wa-tu wa-wili wa-refu wa-li (w)-o vi-soma vi-le vi-tabu vi-refu
1PL-that 1PL-person 1PL-two 1PL-tall 1PL-he-past 7PL-REL-it 7PL-read 7PL-that 7PL-book 7PL-long
'Those two tall people who read those long books.'
The American linguistJoseph Harold Greenberg in his 1960 paper proposed to use the so-calledagglutinative index to calculate a numerical value that would allow a researcher to compare the "degree of agglutitativeness" of various languages.[6] For Greenberg,agglutination means that themorphs are joined only with slight or no modification.[7] Amorpheme is said to be automatic if it either takes a single surface form (morph), or if its surface form is determined by phonological rules that hold in all similar instances in that language.[8] A morph juncture—a position in a word where two morphs meet—is considered agglutinative when both morphemes included are automatic. The index of agglutination is equal to the average ratio of the number of agglutinative junctures to the number of morph junctures. Languages with high values of the agglutinative index are agglutinative and with low values of the agglutinative index are fusional.
In the same paper, Greenberg proposed several other indices, many of which turn out to be relevant to the study of agglutination. Thesynthetic index is the average number of morphemes per word, with the lowest conceivable value equal to 1 forisolating (analytic) languages and real-life values rarely exceeding 3. The compounding index is equal to the average number of root morphemes per word (as opposed to derivational and inflectional morphemes). The derivational, inflectional, prefixial and suffixial indices correspond respectively to the average number of derivational and inflectional morphemes, prefixes and suffixes.
Here is a table of sample values:[9]
| agglutination | synthesis | compounding | derivation | inflection | prefixing | suffixing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Swahili | 0.67 | 2.56 | 1.00 | 0.03 | 0.31 | 0.45 | 0.16 |
| spoken Turkish | 0.67 | 1.75 | 1.04 | 0.06 | 0.38 | 0.00 | 0.44 |
| written Turkish | 0.60 | 2.33 | 1.00 | 0.11 | 0.43 | 0.00 | 0.54 |
| Yakut | 0.51 | 2.17 | 1.02 | 0.16 | 0.38 | 0.00 | 0.53 |
| Greek | 0.40 | 1.82 | 1.02 | 0.07 | 0.37 | 0.02 | 0.42 |
| English | 0.30 | 1.67 | 1.00 | 0.09 | 0.32 | 0.02 | 0.38 |
| Inuit | 0.03 | 3.70 | 1.00 | 0.34 | 0.47 | 0.00 | 0.73 |
The one-to-one relationship between an affix and its grammatical function may be somewhat complicated by the phonological processes active in the given language. For example, the following two phonological phenomena appear in many of theUralic andTurkic languages:
Several examples fromFinnish will illustrate how these two rules and other phonological processes lead to diversions from the basic one-to-one relationship between morphs and their syntactic and semantic function. No phonological rule is applied in the declension oftalo 'house'. However, the second example illustrates several kinds of phonological phenomena.[10][11]
| talo 'house' | märkä paita 'a wet shirt' | the roots contain consonant clusters-rk- and-t- |
| talo-n 'of the house' | märä-n paida-n 'of a wet shirt' | consonant gradation: the genitive suffix-n closes the preceding syllable; rk -> r, t->d |
| talo-ssa 'in the house' | märä-ssä paida-ssa 'in a wet shirt' | vowel harmony: a word containingä may not contain the vowelsa, o, u; an allomorph of the inessive ending-ssa/ssä is used |
| talo-i-ssa 'in the houses' | mär-i-ssä paido-i-ssa 'in wet shirts' | phonological rules also imply different vowel changes when the plural marker-i- meets a stem-final vowel |
It is possible to construct artificially extreme examples of agglutination, which have no real use, but illustrate the theoretical capability of the grammar to agglutinate. This is not a question of "long words", because some languages permit limitless combinations with compound words, negative clitics or such, which can be (and are) expressed with an analytic structure in actual usage.
English is capable of agglutinating morphemes of solely native (Germanic) origin, asun-whole-some-ness, but generally speaking thelongest words are assembled from forms ofLatin orAncient Greek origin. The classic example isantidisestablishmentarianism. Agglutinative languages often have more complex derivational agglutination than isolating languages, so they can do the same to a much larger extent. For example, in Hungarian, a word such aselnemzetietleníthetetlenségnek, which means "for [the purposes of] undenationalizationability" can find actual use.[12] In the same way, there are the words that have meaning, but probably are never used such aslegeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbjeitekként, which means "like the most of most undesecratable ones of you", but is hard to decipher even for native speakers. Using inflectional agglutination, these can be extended. For example, the official Guinness world record is Finnishepäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän "I wonder if – even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized". It has the derived wordepäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyys as the root and is lengthened with the inflectional endings-llänsäkäänköhän. However, this word is grammatically unusual, because-kään "also" is used only in negative clauses, but-kö (question) only in question clauses.
A very popular Turkish agglutination isÇekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız, meaning "(Apparently / I've heard that) You are one of those that we were not able to convert into Czechoslovakians". This historical reference is used as a joke for the individuals who are hard to change or those who stick out in a group.
On the other hand,Afyonkarahisarlılaştırabildiklerimizdenmişsinizcesine is a longer word that does not surprise people and means "As if you were one of those we were able to make resemble people fromAfyonkarahisar". A recent addition to the claims has come with the introduction of the following word in Turkishmuvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, which means something like "(you are talking) as if you are one of those that we were unable to turn into a maker of unsuccessful people" (someone who un-educates people to make them unsuccessful).
Georgian is also a highly agglutinative language. For example, the wordgadmosakontrrevolucieleblebisnairebisatvisaco (გადმოსაკონტრრევოლუციელებლებისნაირებისათვისაცო) would mean "(someone not specified) said that it is also for those who are like the ones who need to be to again/back counter-revolutionized".
Aristophanes' comedyAssemblywomen includes the Greek wordλοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων, a fictional dish named with a word that enumerates its ingredients. It was created to ridicule a trend for long compounds inAttic Greek at the time.[citation needed]
Slavic languages are not considered agglutinative butfusional. However, extreme derivations similar to ones found in typical agglutinative languages do exist. A famous example is theBulgarian wordнепротивоконституциослователствувайте, meaningdon't speak against the constitution and secondarilydon't act against the constitution. It is composed of just three roots: противagainst, конституцияconstitution, a loan word and therefore devoid of its internal composition and словоword. The remaining are bound morphemes for negation (не, a proclitic, otherwise written separately in verbs), noun intensifier (-ателств), noun-to-verb conversion (-ува), imperative mood second person plural ending (-йте). It is rather unusual, but finds some usage, e.g. newspaper headlines on 13 July 1991, the day after the current Bulgarian constitution was adopted with much controversy and debate, and even scandals.
The wordsagglutination andagglutinative come from the Latin wordagglutinare, 'to glue together'. In linguistics, these words have been in use since 1836, whenWilhelm von Humboldt's posthumously published workÜber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts [lit.: On the differences of human language construction and its influence on the mental development of mankind] introduced the division of languages intoisolating,inflectional,agglutinative andincorporating.[13]
Especially in some older literature,agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym forsynthetic. In that case, it embraces what we call agglutinative and inflectional languages, and it is an antonym ofanalytic orisolating. Besides the clear etymological motivation (after all, inflectional endings are also "glued" to the stems), this more general usage is justified by the fact that the distinction between agglutinative and inflectional languages is not a sharp one, as we have already seen.
In the second half of the 19th century, many linguists believed that there is a natural cycle of language evolution: function words of the isolating type are glued to their head-words, so that the language becomes agglutinative; later morphs become merged through phonological processes, and what comes out is an inflectional language; finally inflectional endings are often dropped in quick speech, inflection is omitted and the language goes back to the isolating type.[14]
The following passage from Lord (1960) demonstrates well the whole range of meanings that the wordagglutination may have.
(Agglutination...) consists of the welding together of two or more terms constantly occurring as a syntagmatic group into a single unit, which becomes either difficult or impossible to analyse thereafter.
Agglutination takes various forms. In French, welding becomes complete fusion. Latinhanc horam 'at this hour' is the French adverbial unitencore. Old Frenchtous jours becomestoujours, anddès jà ('since now')déjà ('already'). In English, on the other hand, apart from rare combinations such asgood-bye fromGod be with you,walnut fromWales nut,window fromwind-eye (O.N.vindauga), the units making up the agglutinated forms retain their identity. Words likeblackbird andbeefeater are a different kettle of fish; they retain their units but their ultimate meaning is not fully deducible from these units. (...)
Saussure preferred to distinguish betweencompound words and trulysynthesised or agglutinated combinations.[15]
Innatural language processing, languages with rich morphology pose problems of quite a different kind than isolating languages. In the case of agglutinative languages, the main obstacle lies in the large number of word forms that can be obtained from a single root. As we have already seen, the generation of these word forms is somewhat complicated by the phonological processes of the particular language. Although the basic one-to-one relationship between form and syntactic function is not broken in Finnish, the authoritative institutionInstitute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus) lists51 declension types for Finnish nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals.
Even more problems occur with the recognition of word forms. Modern linguistic methods are largely based on the exploitation of corpora; however, when the number of possible word forms is large, any corpus will necessarily contain only a small fraction of them. Hajič (2010) claims that computer space and power are so cheap nowadays that all possible word forms may be generated beforehand and stored in a form of a lexicon listing all possible interpretations of any given word form. (The data structure of the lexicon has to be optimized so that the search is quick and efficient.) According to Hajič, it is the disambiguation of these word forms which is difficult (more so for inflective languages where the ambiguity is high than for agglutinative languages).[16]
Other authors do not share Hajič's view that space is no issue and instead of listing all possible word forms in a lexicon, word form analysis is implemented by modules which try to break up the surface form into a sequence of morphemes occurring in an order permissible by the language. The problem of such an analysis is the large number of morpheme boundaries typical for agglutinative languages. A word of an inflectional language has only one ending and therefore the number of possible divisions of a word into the base and the ending is only linear with the length of the word. In an agglutinative language, where several suffixes are concatenated at the end of the word, the number of different divisions which have to be checked for consistency is large. This approach was used for example in the development of a system for Arabic, where agglutination occurs when articles, prepositionsand conjunctions are joined with the following word and pronouns are joined with the preceding word. See Grefenstette et al. (2005) for more details.
For instance, the Turkic language family is a well-established language family, as is each of the Uralic,Mongolian and Tungusic families. What is controversial, however, is whether or not these individual families are related as members of an even larger family. The possibility of an Altaic family, comprising Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, is rather widely accepted, and some scholars would advocate increasing the size of this family by adding some or all of Uralic, Korean and Japanese.
For instance, the study of word order universals by Greenberg ("Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of meaningful Elements", in J. H. Greenberg (ed.):Universals of language, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1963, pp. 73–112) showed that if a language has verb-final word order (i.e. if 'the man saw the woman' is expressed literally as 'the man the woman saw'), then it is highly probable that it will also have postpositions rather than prepositions (i.e. 'in the house' will be expressed as 'the house in') and that it will have genitives before the noun (i.e. the pattern 'cat's house' rather than 'house of cat'). Thus, if we find two languages that happen to share the features: verb-final word order, postpositions, prenominal genitives, then the co-occurrence of these features is not evidence for genetic relatedness. Many earlier attempts at establishing wide-ranging genetic relationships suffer precisely from failure to take this property of typological patterns into account. Thus the fact that Turkic languages, Mongolian languages, Tungusic languages, Korean and Japanese share all of these features is not evidence for their genetic relatedness (although there may, of course, be other similarities, not connected with recurrent typological patterns, that do establish genetic relatedness).
Flexivní typ je nejvýrazněji zastoupen v estonštině. Projevuje se kongruencí, nedostatkem posesivních sufixů, větší homonymií a synonymií a tolika alternacemi, že se dá mluvit o různých deklinacích. Koncovky jsou většinou fonologicky redukovány, takže ztrácejí slabičnou samostatnost.
However, it is not the morphology itself (not even for inflective or agglutinative languages) that is causing the headache – with today's cheap space and power, simply listing all the thinkable forms in an appropriately hashed list is o.k. – but it's the disambiguation problem, which is apparently more difficult for such morphologically rich languages (perhaps surprisingly more for the inflective ones than agglutinative ones) than for the analytical ones.