1 An empirical test of the Agglutination Hypothesis 1 Martin Haspelmath Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig In this paper, I approach the agglutionation-fusion distinction from an empirical point of view. Although the well-known morphological typology of languages (isolating, agglutinating, flexive/fusional, incorporating) has often been criticized as empty, the old idea that there are (predominantly) agglutinating and (predominantly) fusional languages in fact makes two implicit predictions. First, agglutination/fusion is characteristic of whole languages rather than individual constructions; second, the various components of agglutination/fusion correlate with each other. The (unstated, but widely assumed) Agglutination Hypothesis can thus be formulated as follows: (i) First prediction: If a language is agglutinating/fusional in one area of its morphology (e.g. in nouns, or in the future tense), it shows the same type elsewhere. (ii) Second prediction: If a language is agglutinating/fusional with respect to one of the three agglutination parameters (a-c) (and perhaps others), it shows the same type with respect to the other two parameters: (a) separation/cumulation, (b) morpheme invariance/morpheme variability, (c) affix uniformity/affix suppletion. I report on a study of the nominal and verbal inflectional morphology of a reasonably balanced world-wide sample of 30 languages, applying a variety of measures for the agglutination parameters and determining whether they are cross-linguistically significant. The results do not confirm the validity of the Agglutination Hypothesis, and the current evidence suggests that “agglutination” is just one way of trying to capture the strangeness of non-Indo-European languages, which all look alike to Eurocentric eyes. 1. Agglutination and fusion: An ambiguous success story One of the seemigly most successful stories in the history of linguistic typology is the creation of a holistic morphological typology in the first half of the 19th century, initially by the combined efforts of Friedrich von Schlegel (1808), August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1818), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1822, 1836). As is widely known (e.g. Greenberg 1974:35-41), these three were responsible for the classical subdivision of languages into an isolating (or "analytic") type, an agglutinating type, a fusional (or flexive) type, 2 and an incorporating type. This way of classifying languages was made popular especially by Schleicher (1850) and Müller (1871), and has been part of linguists' textbook knowledge ever since. Almost every introduction to linguistics mentions the terms, and they are frequently used in the technical literature (at least the term agglutinating/agglutination). Three representative sentences from recent works by influential authors are given in (1). (1) a. Evans (1995:1): “Kayardild is a dependent-marking, agglutinating, entirely suffixing language with a free order of phrasal constituents and a rich system of case-marking...” 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 3rd conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (Amsterdam 1999) and at the 9th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 2000). I am grateful to the audiences at these occasions, as well as to two reviewers, for useful comments. (The core ideas of this paper were first presented at the DGfS Summer School on Language Typology in Mainz, September 1998.) 2 For the flexive type, other term variants such as (in)flexional/inflectional are also often used. As was often noted (e.g. Bazell 1958), the term inflectional is confusing because it also has a different sense: One also says that agglutinating languages have inflection (i.e. different word-forms belonging to a single lexeme), so Sapir's term fusional has tended to supplant it in the typological sense. Plank (1999) retains the term flexive (deliberately differentiating it from inflectional), presumably because he feels that there is much more to the agglutination/flexion distinction than what Sapir meant by fusion (cf. note 7). In this paper, I use fusion as the opposite of agglutination, simply because it seems that this term is now better known.