Agglutination

For biological agglutination, see Agglutination (biology).

In linguistics, agglutination is the morphological process of adding affixes to the base of a word. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. These languages are often contrasted with fusional languages and isolating languages. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which is an isolating language, but has an agglutinated plural marker -(e)s and derived words such as shame·less·ness.

Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, by adding a consonant to the syllable coda as in English tie — ties. Native speakers of strongly agglutinating languages untrained in linguistics cannot usually break down an agglutinated word into its components. Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, too, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage.

Examples of European agglutinative languages are the related languages of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Both have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllablic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes. For example, the Finnish word talo·ssa·ni·kin means "in my house, too". Derivation can also be quite complex. For example, Finnish epä·järje·st·el·mä·lli·s·yys has the root järki "logos", and consists of negative-"logos"-causative-frequentative-nominalizer-adessive-"related to"-"property", and means "the property of being unsystematic".

Agglutination is used very heavily in some Native American languages, such as Inuktitut, where one word can contain enough morphemes to convey the meaning of what would be a complex sentence in other languages.

Japanese is also an agglutinating language, adding information such as negative mood, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree and causality in the verb form. Common examples would be hatarak·ase·rare·tara "if (s/he) had been made to work..." and tabe·ta·ku·na·katta "(I) did not want to eat". Turkish is also another agglutinating language. a common example is that: the phrase "avustralya-lı-laştıramadık-larımız-dan mısınız?" is a one word in Turkish but it can be translated into English as "are you one of whom we couldn't make australian"

Extremes of agglutination

It is possible to construct artificial 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", since 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.

The English language, missing inflectional agglutination, can use only derivational Latin agglutination, as in e.g. anti·dis·establish·ment·arian·ism. Agglunative 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 as el·nem·zet·i·etlen·ít·het·et·len·ség·nek, which means "for purposes of undenationalizationability" can find actual use. Using inflectional agglutination, these can be extended. For example, the official Guinness world record is Finnish epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän "Wonder if he can also ... with his capability of not causing things to be unsystematic". It has the derived word epä·järje·st·el·mä·llis·tyttä·mä·ttö·m·yys as the root and is lengthened with the inflectional endings -llä·nsä·kään·kö·hän. However, this word is grammatically unusual, since -kään "also" is used only in negative clauses, but -kö (question) only in question clauses.

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Extremes of agglutination

See also