FUSIONAL

views updated May 21 2018

FUSIONAL. In LINGUISTICS, a term denoting a language in which the grammatical units within a word (its MORPHEMES) tend to be fused together, as in Latin feminarum of women, in which the ending -arum fuses the notions possession, plural, feminine. Many languages have some fusion: English geese (‘goose’ and plural together), sat (‘sit’ and past together), but in a language such as Latin this process predominates. See LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY.