Abstract
AbstractAlthough some characteristics of incorporating verbs and non-incorporating verbs have been proposed in previous studies, little systematic cross-linguistic research has been done on restrictions on the types of verbs that incorporate nouns. Knowledge about possible verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation may, however, provide important insights for theoretical approaches to noun incorporation, in particular regarding the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect. This paper therefore investigates to what extent languages restrict noun incorporation to particular verbs and what types of restrictions appear to be relevant cross-linguistically. The study consists of two parts: an explorative typological survey based on descriptive sources of 50 incorporating languages, and a more detailed investigation of incorporating verbs in corpus data from a sample of eight languages, guided by a questionnaire. The results demonstrate that noun incorporation is indeed restricted in terms of which verbs allow this construction within and across languages. The likelihood that a verb can incorporate is partly determined by its degree of morphosyntactic transitivity, but the attested variation across verbs and across languages shows that purely lexical restrictions play an important role as well.
Highlights
This work is licensed incorporation may, provide important insights for theoretical approaches to noun incorporation, in particular regarding the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect
Some characteristics of incorporating and non-incorporating verbs have been proposed in previous studies, little systematic cross-linguistic research has been done on restrictions on the types of verbs that incorporate nouns
Knowledge about possible verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation may provide important insights concerning the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect
Summary
Incorporation may, provide important insights for theoretical approaches to noun incorporation, in particular regarding the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect. Knowledge about possible verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation may provide important insights concerning the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect. In some languages antipassives may only be formed on the basis of “a certain subset of transitive predicates” (Polinsky 2013) Such restrictions may be relevant for noun incorporation, which in many languages has a valency-changing effect in that incorporated nouns may lose their morphosyntactic status of core argument (Gerdts 1998: 88; Mithun 1984: 856, 859; Rosen 1989: 310–311)
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