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Fusional languages orinflected languages are a type ofsynthetic language, distinguished fromagglutinative languages by their tendency to use singleinflectionalmorphemes to denote multiplegrammatical,syntactic, orsemantic features.
For example, theSpanishverbcomer ("to eat") has thefirst-personsingularpreterite tense formcomí ("I ate"); the singlesuffix-í representsboth the features of first-person singularagreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separateaffix for each feature.
Another illustration of fusionality is theLatin wordbonus ("good"). The ending-us denotes masculinegender,nominative case, and singularnumber. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix-us with a different one. In the formbonum, the ending-um denotes masculineaccusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.
ManyIndo-European languages feature fusional morphology, including:
Another notable group of fusional languages is theSemitic languages, includingHebrew,Arabic, andAmharic. These also often involvenonconcatenative morphology, in which a word root is often placed into templates denoting its function in a sentence. Arabic is especially notable for this, with the common example being the rootk-t-b being placed into multiple different patterns.
Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional.
A limited degree of fusion is also found in manyUralic languages, likeHungarian,Estonian,Finnish, and theSami languages, such asSkolt Sami, as they are primarilyagglutinative.[citation needed]
Unusual for a Native North American language,Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology.[1][2]
SomeAmazonian languages such asAyoreo have fusional morphology.[3]
TheFuegian languageSelkʼnam has fusional elements. For example, bothevidentiality andgender agreement are coded with a single suffix on the verb:[4]
CERT:certainty (evidential):evidentiality
SomeNilo-Saharan languages such asLugbara are also considered fusional.[5]
Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries, some much more quickly than others.[6]Proto-Indo-European was fusional, but some of its descendants have shifted to a moreanalytic structure such asModern English,Danish andAfrikaans or toagglutinative such asPersian andArmenian.
Other descendants remain fusional, includingSanskrit,Ancient Greek,Lithuanian,Latvian,Slavic languages, as well asLatin and theRomance languages and certainGermanic languages.
Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional.
For example, mostUralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, butEstonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand,Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits and thereby has stayed closer to the mainstream Uralic type. However,Sámi languages, while also part of the Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian since they involveconsonant gradation but also vowelapophony.
Inflections in fusional languages tend to fall in two patterns, based on which part of speech they modify:declensions for nouns and adjectives, andconjugations for verbs.
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One feature of many fusional languages is their systems ofdeclensions in which nouns and adjectives have an affix attached to them that specifiesgrammatical case (their uses in the clause),number andgrammatical gender. Pronouns may also alter their forms entirely to encode that information.
Within a fusional language, there are usually more than one declension;Latin andGreek have five, and theSlavic languages have anywhere between three and seven.German has multiple declensions based on the vowel or consonant ending the word, though they tend to be more unpredictable.
However, many descendants of fusional languages tend to lose their case marking. In mostRomance andGermanic languages, including ModernEnglish (with the notable exceptions of German, Icelandic and Faroese), encoding for case is merely vestigial because it no longer encompasses nouns and adjectives but only pronouns.
Compare theItalianegli (masculine singularnominative),gli (masculine singulardative, or indirect object),lo (masculine singularaccusative) andlui (also masculine singular accusative but emphatic andindirect case to be used with prepositions), corresponding to the single vestigial triohe, him, his in English.
Conjugation is the alteration of the form of averb to encode information about some or all ofgrammatical mood,voice,tense,aspect,person,grammatical gender andnumber. In a fusional language, two or more of those pieces of information may be conveyed in a single morpheme, typically a suffix.
For example, inFrench, the verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject. That gives rise to typically45 different single-word forms of the verb, each of which conveys some or all of the following:
Changing any one of those pieces of information without changing the others requires the use of a different suffix, the key characteristic of fusionality.
English has two examples of conjugational fusion. The verbal suffix-s indicates a combination of present tense with both third-person and singularity of the associated subject, and the verbal suffix-ed used in a verb with no auxiliary verb conveys bothnon-progressive aspect and past tense.
