Univerbation

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

References
  1. Brinton, Laurel J., & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 48.
  2. Givón, Talmy. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: an archaeologist's field trip. Chicago Linguistic Society 7 (1):394–415, p.413.
  3. 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.
  4. 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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