agglutination

/euh glooht'n ay"sheuhn/, n.

1. the act or process of uniting by glue or other tenacious substance.

2. the state of being thus united; adhesion of parts.

3. that which is united; a mass or group cemented together.

4. Immunol. the clumping of bacteria, red blood cells, or other cells, due to the introduction of an antibody.

5. Ling. a process of word formation in which morphemes, each having one relatively constant shape, are combined without fusion or morphophonemic change, and in which each grammatical category is typically represented by a single morpheme in the resulting word, esp. such a process involving the addition of one or more affixes to a base, as in Turkish, in which ev means "house," ev-den means "from a house," and ev-ler-den means "from houses."

[1535-45; AGGLUTINATE + -ION]

* * *

▪ grammar

      a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (word elements), each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category. This term is traditionally employed in the typological classification of languages. Turkish (Turkish language), Finnish, and Japanese are among the languages that form words by agglutination. The Turkish term ev-ler-den “from the houses” is an example of a word containing a stem and two word elements; the stem is ev- “house,” the element -ler- carries the meaning of plural, and -den indicates “from.” In Wishram, a dialect of Chinook (a North American Indian language), the word ačimluda (“He will give it to you”) is composed of the elements a- “future,” -č- “he,” -i- “him,” -m- “thee,” -1- “to,” -ud- “give,” and -a “future.”

      Agglutinating languages contrast with inflecting languages, in which one word element may represent several grammatical categories, and also with isolating languages, in which each word consists of only one word element. Most languages are mixtures of all three types.

* * *