Agglutination

In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages.

Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with languages in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words (isolating languages) and with languages in which a single affix typically expresses several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes (as is the case in inflectional (fusional) 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 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. 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.

Note that the term agglutination is sometimes used more generally to refer to the morphological process of adding suffixes or other morphemes to the base of a word. This is treated in more detail in the section on other uses of the term.