Agglutination


In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative Turkish, the word evlerinizden consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-iz-den. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.

Examples of agglutinative languages

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-called Ural–Altaic language family, which included the Uralic and Turkic languages, as well as Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese. Contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial, and some refer to this as a language 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.

Eurasia and Oceania

Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-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 is fiaiéi, where the root "fi-" means "son", the subsequent four vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means " belong to his/her sons". The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals are quite remarkable.
Though Indo-European languages are generally non-agglutinating, there are exceptions. 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. Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + postposition suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example, the phrase "/ماشین‌های‌شان را نگاه می‌کردم" meaning 'I was looking at their cars' lit. ' '.
Breaking down the first word:
ماشین++شان+را
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.
Almost all Austronesian languages, such as Malay, and most Philippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The Indonesian and Malay word mempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and benefactive affixes to the compound verb tanggung jawab, which means "to account for". In Tagalog, nakakapágpabagabag is formed from the root bagabag.
In East Asia, Korean is an agglutinating language. Its uses of '조사', '접사', and '어미' makes Korean agglutinate. They represent tense, time, number, causality, and honorific forms.
Japanese is also an agglutinating language, like Korean, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree and causality in the verb form. Common examples would be, which combines causative, passive or potential, and conditional conjugations to arrive at two meanings depending on context "if had been made to work..." and "if could make work", and, which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean "I/he/she/they did not want to eat".
Turkish, along with all other Turkic languages, is another agglutinating language: as an extreme example, the expression Muvaffakiyetsizleştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine 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" and "-imiz" making it become "we". Similarly, this suffix means "our" and not "we".
Dravidian languages are agglutinative. For example, in Tamil, the word "அதைப்பண்ணமுடியாதவர்களுக்காகவும்" means "and for the sake of those who cannot do that", composed of the morphemes அது + -ஐ + பண்ணு + -அ + முடி + -ஆத- + அவர் + -கள் + -உக்கு + ஆகு + -அ + -உம். Another example is verb conjugation. In all Dravidian languages, verbal markers are used to convey tense and mood, and usually person. For example, in Tamil, "சாப்பிடுகிறேன்" is formed from the verb root சாப்பிடு- + the present tense marker -கிற்- + the first-person singular suffix -ஏன்.
Agglutination is also a notable feature of Basque. 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 by da, kar, tza and t. Another example would be the declension: Etxean = "In the house" where etxe = house.

Americas

Agglutination is used very heavily in most Native American languages, such as the Inuit languages, Nahuatl, Mapudungun, Quechua, Tz'utujil, Kaqchikel, Cha'palaachi and Kʼicheʼ, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence 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.

Slots

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; 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 finite Korean verb has seven slots :
  1. honorific: -si is used when the speaker is honouring the subject of the sentence
  2. tense: -ss for completed action or state; when this slot is empty, the tense is interpreted as present is pronounced as, but -었다 is pronounced as
  3. experiential-contrastive aspect: -ss doubling the past tense marker means "the subject has had the experience described by the verb"
  4. modal: -keyss is used with first-person-subjects only for definite future and with second-or-third-person-subjects also for probable present or past
  5. formal: -pni expresses politeness to the hearer
  6. retrospective aspect: -te; indicates that the speaker recollects what he observed in the past and reports in the present situation
  7. mood: -ta for declarative, -kka for interrogative, -la for imperative, -ca for propositive, -yo for polite declarative and a large number of other possible mood markers
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, over 400 verb forms may be formed from a single base. Here are a few examples formed from the word root ga 'to go'; the numbers indicate which slots contain non-empty suffixes:
  • 7 : imperative suffix -la combines with the root ka- to express imperative:
  • : 'Go!'
  • 7 : if we want to express proposition rather than command, the propositive mood marker is used: -ja instead of -ra :
  • : 'Let's go!'
  • 5 and 7: If the speaker wants to show respect for the hearer, he uses the politeness marker -pni ; various mood markers may be simultaneously used :
  • : 'He is going.'
  • : 'Is he going?'
  • 6: retrospective aspect:
  • : 'I observed that John was going home and now I am reporting that to you.'
  • 7: simple indicative:
  • : 'The teacher is going home. '
  • 5 and 7: politeness towards the hearer:
  • : or 'The teacher is going home.',
  • 1 and 7: respect towards the subject:
  • : 'The teacher is going home.'
  • 1, 5 and 7: two kinds of politeness in one sentence:
  • : or 'The teacher is going home. '
  • 2, 3 and 7: past forms:
  • : 'John has gone to school.'
  • : 'John has been to school.'
  • 4 and 7: first person modal:
  • : 'I will go tomorrow.'
  • 4 and 7: third person modal:
  • : 'I suppose that John will go tomorrow.'
  • : 'I suppose that John left yesterday.'

    Suffixing or prefixing

Although most agglutinative languages in Europe and Asia are predominantly suffixing, the Bantu 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, the Swahili nouns -toto and -tu fall into class 1, with singular prefix m- and plural prefix wa-. The noun -tabu falls into class 7, with singular prefix ki- and plural prefix vi-. The following sentences may be formed: