In
linguistics, a
marker is a free or bound
morpheme that indicates the
grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as
clitics or
inflectional affixes. In
analytic languages and
agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In
fusional languages and
polysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word
amo ("I love") is marked by suffix
-o for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Analytic languages tend to have a relatively limited number of markers.