fusional (adj.)

A term describing a type of LANGUAGE sometimes distinguished in COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS using STRUCTURAL (as opposed to historical) criteria, and focusing on the characteristics of the WORD: in fusional languages, words typically contain more than one MORPHEME, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between these morphemes and the linear SEQUENCE of MORPHS the words contain. Languages such as Latin and Sanskrit represent this type, also known as INFLECTING languages. For example, in Latin amicus (‘friend’), this form fuses the features masculine, NOMINATIVE and singular, in addition to the ROOT, in a manner which makes the word extremely difficult to segment morphologically (except by WORD-AND-PARADIGM techniques). As always in such classifications, the categories are not clear-cut: different languages will display the characteristic of fusion to a greater or lesser degree.

The term is also used, independently of this classification, to refer to the merging of exponents within a linguistic unit, especially a word; e.g. took represents the ‘fusion’ of take + past; sounds may be ‘fused’ in some types of ASSIMILATION.