Eleme Noun Incorporation

Abstract

This paper generally argues that in Eleme the process of elision triggers a number of other phonological processes such as aphaeresis, apocope, syncope; it offers concrete evidence of tone stability in the face of segment deletion, and evidence of noun incorporation. More specifically, it argues that superficially, Eleme elision process appears to indicate that the noun following the verb is incorporated into the stem. In other words, in Eleme, prosodically independent elements following inflected verb stem frequently become phonologically integrated with the stem following elision of the syllable nucleus. Constructions of this type are clear instances of noun incorporation in the sense of Mithum (1984), Gerdts (1988), T. Mohanan (1994, 1995), Bresnan and Michombo (1995) and Bresnan (2001) since they exhibit all the grammatical properties of this process. But, I caution that care should be exercised in analysing the relationship between a verb stem and following object as noun incorporation since incorporation in Eleme is often attributable to hiatus resolution strategies. This paper suspects that noun incorporation may actually exist in Eleme but the elision process discuss in it does not result into such constructions that admit the term noun incorporation.