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Agglutinating language

MORPHOLOGY: a language which has a morphological system in which words as a rule are polymorphemic and where each morpheme corresponds to a single lexical meaning. Classical examples of agglutinating languages are Turkish and Quechua:

(i)	Turkish
	ev-	ler-	i-	        den	   'from their house'
	house	plural	possessive	ablative

(ii)	Quechua
	maqa-	chi-	naku-	        rka-	n  'they let each other be beaten'
	beat	cause	reciprocal	plural	3
Next to agglutinating languages, one distinguishes (in)flectional languages, isolating languages, and polysynthetic languages. One basic assumption underlying this typology is that agglutination is the primary type of word formation, and that the other three types are deviations from it. This traditional classification of languages into four morphological groups has been criticized for being both incoherent and useless.
LIT. Anderson, S.R. (1985)
Spencer, A. (1991)