(By Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols): "Fusion refers to the degree to which grammatical markers (called formatives in the following) are phonologically connected to a host word or stem. There are three basic values: isolating, concatenative, and nonlinear. Isolating formatives are full-fledged phonological words of their own... Concatenative formatives are phonologically bound. They need some other host word for their pronunciation and form one single phonological word together with that host... Once the phonological alternations are properly analyzed, strings of concatenative formatives can be segmented into clear-cut morphemes. Nonlinear formatives are not amenable to this because they are realized not in linear sequence but by direct modification of their host. In our sample, we found two subtypes of nonlinear formatives: ablaut and tonal."