ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Baker
Brett Baker (University of New England)
brett.baker@une.edu.au
Towards a unified analysis of noun incorporation in polysynthetic
languages
It appears to be universally the case that in languages with noun incorporation
(NI), the incorporated noun (IN) is restricted to a subset of grammatical or
thematic roles, typically theme, but also instrument, and location. Agents appear
to be universally restricted from incorporated position, as in (1). Derivational
accounts of noun incorporation (e.g. Baker 1988, 1996) make a virtue of
configurationally-assigned argument positions to account for the restriction. Lexical
theories have no straightforward way of accounting for this restriction in a nonstipulative
fashion. Recent formal semantic accounts (beginning with Szabolcsi
1997 and van Geenhoven 1998) have developed new lines of analysis, based
on the scope properties of INs. In these models, incorporated nouns are crucially
non- referential, property-denoting (rather than individual-denoting) arguments,
bound by existential quantification within the VP. These authors show that
several characteristic behaviours common to noun incorporation follow from this
analysis. We extend this analysis in a number of ways, using data mainly from
the Gunwinyguan (Australian) language Wubuy, also known as Nunggubuyu. We
show that the semantic approach can account for some or all of the distributional
properties of INs with respect to argument structure and proposition type. In
particular, it can account for the occurrence of IN subjects in existential (‘thetic’)
intransitive propositions (in BGW as well as Wubuy), as in (2), while incorporation
is restricted in other kinds of intransitive predicates, notably ‘individual-level’ ones
(such as ‘fire is hot’). We show that this also accounts for the failure of INs to be
the subjects of generic propositions referring to kinds (as in ‘Kangaroos eat grass’),
because of several interacting factors. We also extend the analysis to incorporation
into adjectives, not commonly a focus of incorporation discussions, and show
that the distribution of N-Adj incorporated words follows from the analysis of verbs.
In particular, N-Adj words can only be referential (3), they cannot be propositional
unless thetic. Finally, we elaborate on the DRT model to enable more flexibility
in the referential properties of INs, while maintaining the core intuition that noun
incorporation is associated with loss of referentiality or discourse salience.
(1) Mayali (Evans 2003: 473)
Bi-yau-nguneng
3/3h-child-eat.PP
ginga
crocodile
‘The crocodile ate the child’ (Not: ‘The child ate the crocodile.’)