In linguistics, 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]
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, (French,) acts like a single adjectival word that means 'cheap', the opposite of which is French: cher ('costly') as opposed to French: [un] mauvais marché ('a bad deal').
It may be contrasted with compounding (composition). 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.[3]
It differs from agglutination in that agglutination is not limited to the word level.[4]
Crasis (merging of adjacent vowels) is one way in which words are univerbated in some languages.