Incorporation : Morpho - Syntactic vs . Semantic Considerations

The term incorporation canonically refers to cases of complementation in which a theme argument, lacking functional structure, is syntactically fused with the verb. In this pristine form incorporation appears to be a close kin of word-level compounding. Recently, however, the term has been extended to apply to structures in which the theme argument is realized as a full blown noun phrase and shows no signs of fusion with the verb. In this less pristine form incorporation seems to be akin to regular transitive structures. In this paper, I subscribe to this elastic notion of the term incorporation while maintaining its distinction from compounding on the one hand and regular complementation on the other. Establishing an independent grammatical status for incorporation requires navigating between morpho-syntactic identifiers of incorporation and subtle but robust semantic properties that are unique to it. I begin by sketching in broad strokes the morpho-syntactic differences between canonical incorporation targeting N 0 and pseudo-incorporation targeting NP. In section 2, I review four semantic properties that have been variously taken to characterize incorporation. Against this background, I turn in sections 3 and 4 to two recent developments in the literature on incorporation, one extending the notion of pseudo-incorporation to include DPs, the other analyzing incorporation and compounding as parametric variants of each other. As would be obvious, the discussion in Borik and Gehrke (this volume) bears on all of the issues discussed here. Let us start, then, with brief sketches of two crucial stages in the study of noun incorporation, characterized by the structural complexity of the nominal involved: N 0 vs. NP. Polysynthetic languages like Mohawk and Inuit, brought into the linguistic canon by Sadock (1980, 1986), Mithun (1984, 1986) and Baker (1988), are canonical examples of incorporation. In the following we can compare a standard transitive structure in Inuit (1a) with a noun incorporated version (1b):