Incorporation (linguistics)

In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. The inclusion of a noun qualifies the verb, narrowing its scope rather than making reference to a specific entity.

Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, Siberia and northern Australia. However, polysynthesis does not necessarily imply incorporation (Mithun 2009)

In this example, the root for bed nakt has incorporated into the verbal construction and appears before the verbal root. Two other incidental changes are noticed here. First, the agreement marker in the first example is k and in the second example is ke. These are two phonologically-conditioned allomorphs. In other words, the choice between using k and ke is based on the other sounds in the word (and has nothing to do with noun incorporation). Also, there is an epenthetic vowel a between the nominal and verbal roots. This vowel is inserted to break up an illegal consonant cluster (and also has nothing to do with noun incorporation).

Panare

The next example, from Panare, illustrates the cross-linguistically common phenomenon that the incorporated form of a noun may be significantly different from its unincorporated form. The first sentence contains the incorporated form u<nowiki>'</nowiki> of "head", and the second its unincorporated form ipu:

Chukchi

Chukchi, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language spoken in North Eastern Siberia, provides a wealth of examples of noun incorporation. The phrase təpelarkən qoraŋə means "I'm leaving the reindeer" and has two words (the verb in the first person singular, and the noun). The same idea can be expressed with the single word təqorapelarkən, in which the noun root qora- "reindeer" is incorporated into the verb word.

Mohawk

Mohawk, an Iroquoian language, makes heavy use of incorporation, as in: watia'tawi'tsherí:io "it is a good shirt", where the noun root atia'tawi "upper body garment" is present inside the verb.

Cheyenne

Cheyenne, an Algonquian language of the Great Plains, also uses noun incorporation on a regular basis. Consider nátahpe'emaheona, meaning "I have a big house", which contains the noun morpheme maheo "house".

Chinese (Mandarin)

Chinese makes extensive use of verb-object compounds, which are compounds composed of two constituents having the syntactic relation of verb and its direct object. For example, the verb 'sleep (VO)' is composed of the verb 'sleep (V)' and the bound morpheme object 'sleep (N)'. Aspect markers (e.g. PERFECTIVE), classifier phrases (e.g. THREE + CL + hours), and other elements may separate the two constituents of these compounds, though different verb-object compounds vary in degree of separability.

Turkish

The verb etmek in Turkish always has an incorporated noun object: it cannot occur without one. For example, the noun yardım means "help"; the verbal complex yardım etmek means "to help", with the person being helping occurring in the dative case, e.g. bana yardım etti "s/he helped me", with the first person singular pronoun ben "I" in the dative case bana "to me". The verb kaybetmek evolved from kayıp etmek (both mean "to lose"); kayıp means "loss"; kayıp olmak "to be lost" evolved into kaybolmak.

Noun incorporation

Sapir (1911) and Mithun (1984) define noun incorporation (NI) as "a construction in which a noun and a verb stem combine to yield a complex verb". Due to the wide variation in how noun incorporation presents itself in different languages, however, it is difficult to create an agreed upon and all-encompassing definition. As a result, most syntacticians have focused on generating definitions that apply to the languages they have studied, regardless of whether or not they are cross-linguistically attested.

In many cases, a phrase with an incorporated noun carries a different meaning with respect to the equivalent phrase where the noun is not incorporated into the verb. The difference seems to hang around the generality and definiteness of the statement. The incorporated phrase is usually generic and indefinite, while the non-incorporated one is more specific.

In Yucatec Maya, for example, the phrase "I chopped a tree", when the word for "tree" is incorporated, changes its meaning to "I chopped wood". In Lahu (a Tibeto-Burman language), the definite phrase "I drink the liquor" becomes the more general "I drink liquor" when "liquor" is incorporated. The Japanese phrase 目を覚ます me o samasu means "to wake up" or literally to wake (one's) eyes. But when the direct object is incorporated into the nominal form of the verb, the resulting noun 目覚まし mezamashi literally means "waking up", as in 目覚まし時計　mezamashidokei meaning "alarm clock."

This tendency is not a rule. There are languages where noun incorporation does not produce a meaning change (though it may cause a change in syntaxas explained below).

Noun incorporation can interact with the transitivity of the verb it applies to in two different ways. In some languages, the incorporated noun deletes one of the arguments of the verb, and this is shown explicitly: if the verb is transitive, the derived verb word with an incorporated noun (which functions as the direct object) becomes formally intransitive and is marked as such. In other languages this change does not take place, or at least it is not shown by explicit morphology. A recent study found out that across languages, morphosyntactically highly transitive verbs and patientive intransitive verbs are most likely to perform noun incorporation.

Incorporation looks at whether verb arguments, its nominal complements, exist on the same syntactic level or not. Incorporation is characterized as a stem combination meaning it combines independent lexical items into a modal or auxiliary verb to ultimately form a complex verb. The stem of the verb will be the determiner of the new category in which the incorporation belongs and the noun which was incorporated drops its own categorical features and grammatical markings, if employed. This can be observed in Onondaga, Southern Tiwa and Koryak.

Types

In 1985, Mithun introduced a four-type system to define the functionality and progression of noun incorporation in a language. While this section discusses the influential syntactic and combined approaches to NI, highly-influential lexical accounts, such as Rosen's (1989) paper, do exist.

One highly-influential syntactic account for NI is the head-movement process proposed by Baker (1988). This account states that this NI head movement is distinct from but similar to the better-established phenomenon of phrase movement and involves the movement of a head noun out of object position and into a position where it adjoins to a governing verb. An example of this movement can be seen in figure 1 where the head noun 'baby' is moved out of the object N position to become incorporated with the verb as the sister to the verb 'sit'. While this theory does not account for every language, it does provide a starting point for subsequent syntactic analyses of NI, both with and without head movement. A more recent paper by Baker (2007) addresses a number of other influential accounts including Massam’s pseudo-incorporation, Van Geenhoven’s base generation, and Koopman and Szabolcsi’s small-phrase movement. The paper concluded that, while each account has their own strong points, they all fail to answer some important questions, thus requiring the continued use of Baker's head-movement account.

Examples from different languages

Polysynthetic languages

A polysynthetic language is one in which multiple morphemes, including affixes, are often present within a single word. Each word can therefore express the meaning of a full clause or phrase; this structure has implications on how noun incorporation is manifested in the languages in which it is observed.

Lakhota

In Lakhota, a Siouan language of the plains, for example, the phrase "the man is chopping wood" can be expressed either as a transitive wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe ("man the wood the chopping") or as an intransitive wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe ("man the wood-chopping") in which the independent nominal čháŋ, "wood", becomes a root incorporated into the verb: "wood-chopping".

Mohawk

Mohawk is an Iroquoian language in which noun incorporation occurs. NI is a very salient property of Northern Iroquoian languages, including Mohawk, and is seen unusually often in comparison to other languages. Noun incorporation in Mohawk involves the compounding of a noun stem with a verb stem to form a new verb stem.

{| class="wikitable"

|+ The structure of verbs in Mohawk:

!pre-pronominal prefix

!pronominal prefix

!reflexive and reciprocal particle

!<u>incorporated noun root</u>

!verb root

!suffixes

Mohawk grammar allows for whole propositions to be expressed by one word, which is classified as a verb. Other core elements, namely nouns (subjects, objects, etc.), can be incorporated into the verb. Well-formed verb phrases contain at the bare minimum a verb root and a pronominal prefix. The rest of the elements (and therefore noun incorporation) are optional.

In the examples below, one can see the original sentence in 1a and the same sentence with noun incorporation into the verb in 1b, where instead of "bought a bed", the literal translation of the sentence is "bed-bought".

Another feature of Mohawk which is not as commonly attested cross-linguistically is that Mohawk allows a demonstrative, numeral, or adjective outside the complex verb to be interpreted as a modifier of the incorporated noun. All of the noun incorporation in Cherokee involves a body-part word and few nouns; to make up for the lack of NI, it has a system of classificatory verbs with five distinct categories.

{| class="wikitable"

|+NI involving a body part word

!Cherokee

!Structure

!English translation

|jasgwo:hli:ʔi dagv:yv́ :nì:li

|2sg.PAT-abdomen CISL-1sg>2sg-hit:PFT-MOT

|'I'm going to hit you in the stomach'

{| class="wikitable"

|+NI classificatory verbs

|a. I went elk-hunting the other day.

|b. Peter really enjoys teacup-decorating.

|c. Alice wants to try ladder-making to keep her wood-working skills sharp.

Productive incorporation involves a singular noun with no determiner, quantifier, or adjunct.

{| class="wikitable"

!Possible vs. impossible noun incorporation

In English, it is more common for an argument or an actant to be incorporated into the predicate, which results in additional connotation or metaphoric meaning, e.g., to house-hunt. Although often making the semantics more complex, it simplifies the syntax of the sentence by incorporating the actant-sender house.

English uses only lexical compounding, not composition by juxtaposition or morphological compounding. Phonologically, the V and N are separate words, but syntactically, the N loses its syntactic status as the argument of the sentence, and the VN unit becomes an intransitive predicate.

!Hungarian

!English translation

|házat épít

|'house-building'

|levelet ír

|'letter-writing'

|újságot olvas

|'newspaper-reading'

To be clear, to 'house-build' is not the same as to 'build a house': 'house-building' is a complex activity and a unitary concept, and this is applied to other examples as well.

{| class="wikitable"

|+Example of singular/plural NI AN is an affix in this case.

{| class="wikitable"

|+Example of NI in Korean

Incorporation (linguistics)

Panare

Chukchi

Mohawk

Cheyenne

Chinese (Mandarin)

Turkish

Noun incorporation

Types

Examples from different languages

Polysynthetic languages

Lakhota

Mohawk

References

Further reading