Univerbation
In linguistics, univerbation is the diachronic process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.
The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax".
Examples
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Some univerbated examples are always (from all way; the s was added later), onto (from on to), albeit (from all be it), and colloquial gonna (from going to) and finna (from fixin' to).
Although a univerbated product is normally written as a single word, occasionally it remains orthographically disconnected. For example, bon marché (French, lit. 'good deal') acts like a single adjectival word that means 'cheap', the opposite of which is cher ('costly') as opposed to mauvais marché ('a bad deal').
Similar phenomena
It may be contrasted with compounding (composition). Because compound words do not always originate from fixed phrases that already exist, compounding may be termed a "coercive" or "forced" process. Univerbation, on the other hand, is considered a "spontaneous" process.
It differs from agglutination in that agglutination is not limited to the word level.
Crasis (merging of adjacent vowels) is one way in which words are univerbated in some languages.
See also
References
- ^ Brinton, Laurel J., & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 48.
- ^ Givón, Talmy. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: an archaeologist's field trip. Chicago Linguistic Society 7 (1):394–415, p.413.
- ^ a b Lehmann, Christian (2015). Thoughts on grammaticalization (3 ed.). Language Science Press. p. 161. ISBN 978-3-946234-05-0. In fact, univerbation has traditionally been opposed to composition, this pair of terms being sometimes rendered in German by Zusammenrückung vs. Zusammensetzung . Univerbation is restricted to the syntagmatic axis and may affect any two particular word forms which happen to be habitually used in collocation. Composition, as a schema of word-formation, presupposes a paradigm in analogy to which it proceeds and affects a class of stems according to a structural pattern.
- ^ Lehmann, Christian (2021). "Univerbation" (PDF). Folia Linguistica Historica. 42: TBD. Univerbation is the syntagmatic condensation of a sequence of words recurrent in discourse into one word.
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