In linguistics, univerbation is the diachronic process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.[1]
The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax".[2]
Examples
Some univerbated examples are always (from all [the] way, the s was added later), onto (from on to), albeit (from all be it), and colloquial gonna (from going 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’) and not [un] mauvais marché (‘a bad deal’).
Similar phenomena
It may be contrasted with compounding (composition).[3] 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.[4]
It differs from agglutination in that agglutination is not limited to the word level.[3]
Crasis (merging of adjacent vowels) is one way how words are univerbated, in some languages.
See also
- Grammaticalization
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 [univerbation] vs. Zusammensetzung [composition]. […] 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 preceeds 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.