Noun incorporation and phrasal movement

Abstract

While we agree with Baker (2009) that noun incorporation (NI) is not a unified phenomenon cross-linguistically, we argue against his claim that head movement is still needed for NI in a number of languages (including Mohawk and Mapudungun). Our proposal is that NI involves phrasal movement. The motivation behind our proposal is that incorporated nominals can be much larger than bare roots with a structure incompatible with head movement. The empirical foundation for the phrasal movement claim comes primarily from Onondaga (qua Northern Iroquoian) and Ojibwe (qua Algonquian). In these languages, incorporated nouns appear with nominalizers and inflectional morphemes violating Baker’s (1996, 2003) Proper Head Movement Generalization. Our proposal about NI has important theoretical ramifications: while it has been popular to build words in polysynthetic languages in the syntax via head movement, we view “wordhood” and the polysynthetic properties of such languages as a phonological phenomenon (Dechaine 1999; Branigan et al. 2005; Compton and Pittman 2010).