Inlinguistics, 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]
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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) 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 [un] mauvais marché ('a bad deal').
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 in which words are univerbated in some languages.[citation needed]
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 proceeds and affects a class of stems according to a structural pattern.
Univerbation is the syntagmatic condensation of a sequence of words recurrent in discourse into one word.
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