Noun Incorporation in Southern Tiwa

Abstract

0. Introduction. Noun incorporation, sometimes called noun-verb compounding (see, e.g., Harrington 1910 and Leap 1970), is common within the Tanoan language family, of which Southern Tiwa is a member. In Southern Tiwa the Head noun of subject and direct object is often incorporated into the verb complex; that is, it occurs between the inflectional agreement prefix and the verb. This article describes the conditions under which this incorporation occurs.1 This article has been organized within the framework of uninetwork relational grammar.2 Any data are important to universal grammar, but data described within a particular framework are of far greater value for formulating and testing hypotheses about universals within that framework. Thus we hope that the Southern Tiwa incorporation data being described here will be a significant contribution to universal grammar. Of particular interest is the fact that incorporation constraints make reference to both initial and final relations. In 1-4, we discuss examples which can be accounted for with reference to only a single level of grammatical relations, that is, what in relational grammar is referred to as the final level.3 In 5 we discuss examples which we analyze as involving more than one level of relations, so that incorporation in these cases is not fully explicated without