Morphosyntactic defectiveness in complex predicate formation
This article focuses on verb valency change in complex predicate formation by noun incorporation. I reassess the claim that incorporated nouns and clitics in both Uto-Aztecan and Romance languages are morphosyntactically defective, and I show that crucially morphosyntactic defectiveness, but not semantic prototypicality is a necessary condition in many natural languages in order to identify formally those nominal expressions that are to be interpreted as property-denoting expressions and event predicate modifiers, rather than as canonical syntactic and semantic arguments.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1
Mithun’s (1984) types of NI
-
2.2Conceptual approach to NI (Borthen 2003; Carlson 2010)
- 2.3Towards a morphosyntactic approach to NI
- 3.Morphosyntactic defectiveness in NI
- 3.1NI in Uto-Aztecan (Jelinek 1998; Haugen 2007, 2008)
- 3.2NI in Romance (Dobrovie-Sorin et al. 2006; Espinal 2010; Espinal & McNally 2007a, 2007b, 2011)
- 3.3Clitic incorporation in Mexican Spanish (Navarro 2009; Navarro & Espinal 2012)
- 4.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
References (49)
References
Baker, Mark. 1988. Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Mark. 1996. The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: OUP.
Baker, Mark. 2001. The Atoms of Language. New York NY: The Basic Books.
Beavers, John 2011. On affectedness. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29: 335–370. 

Borik, Olga & Gehrke, Berit. 2015. An introduction to the syntax and semantics of pseudo-incorporation. Syntax and Semantics 40: 1–43.
Borthen, Kaja. 2003. Norwegian Bare Singulars. PhD dissertation, NTNU, Trondheim.
Carlson, Greg. 2010. Generics and concepts. In Kinds, Things and Stuff, Francis Jeffrey Pelletier (ed.), 16–35. Oxford: OUP.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Chung, Sandra & Ladusaw, William A. 2004. Restriction and Saturation. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Cuervo, María Cristina. 2003. Datives at Large. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Cyrino, Sonia & Espinal, M.Teresa. 2015. Bare nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: More on the DP/NP analysis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33: 471–521.
.
Dayal, Veneeta. 2003. A semantics for pseudo incorporation. Ms, Rutgers University. < [URL]>.
Dayal, Veneeta. 2011. Hindi pseudo incorporation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29: 123–167. 

Dayal, Veneeta. 2015. Incorporation: Morphosyntactic vs. semantic considerations. Syntax and Semantics 40: 47–87.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen, Bleam Tonia & Espinal, M.Teresa. 2006. Bare nouns, number and types of incorporation. In Non-Definiteness and Plurality [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 95], Liliane Tasmowski & Svetlana Vogeleer (eds), 51–79. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Downing, Pamela. 1977. On the creation and use of English compound nouns. Language 53(4): 810–842. 

Dowty, David. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. 

Espinal, M.Teresa. 2010. Bare nominals in Catalan and Spanish. Their structure and meaning. Lingua 120(4): 984–1009. 

Espinal, M.Teresa & Mateu, Jaume. 2011. Bare nominals and argument structure in Catalan and Spanish. The Linguistic Review 28: 1–39. 

Espinal, M.Teresa & McNally, Louise. 2007a. Bare singular nominals and incorporating verbs. In Proceedings of the III NEREUS International Workshop. Definiteness, Specificity and Animacy in Ibero–Romance Languages [Arbeitspapiere des Fachbereichs Sprachwissenschaft 122], Georg Kaiser & Manuel Leonetti (eds), 45–62. Konstanz: Universität Konstanz.
Espinal, M.Teresa & McNally, Louise. 2007b. Bare singulars: Variation at the syntax-semantics interface. Paper presented at the Workshop on Bare nouns and Nominalizations. Stuttgart: Universität Stuttgart.
Espinal, M.Teresa & McNally, Louise. 2011. Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan. Journal of Linguistics 47: 87–128. 

Farkas, Donka & de Swart, Henriëtte. 2003. The Semantics of Incorporation: From Argument Structure to Discourse Transparency. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Hale, Kenneth L. & Keyser, Samuel Jay. 1993. On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Kenneth L. Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds), 53–109. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Haugen, Jason D. 2007. Denominal verbs and noun incorporation. Uto-Aztecan evidence for a unified syntactic account. Texas Linguistics Society 9: 145–165.
Jelinek, Eloise. 1998. Voice and transitivity as functional projections in Yaqui. In The Projection of Arguments. Lexical and Compositional Factors, Miriam Butt & Wilhem Geuder (eds), 195–224. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Levin, Beth. 2011. Verb classes within and across languages. Paper presented at the Valency Classes Conference. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Leipzig.
Levin, Beth & Rappaport-Hovav, Malka. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Mateu, Jaume. 2012. Conflation and incorporation processes in resultative constructions. In Telicity, Change, and State. A Cross-Categorial View of Event Structure, Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds), 252–278. Oxford: OUP. 

McNally, Louise & Van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1997. Redefining the weak/strong distinction. Paper presented at the 1997 Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique àParis.
Mithun, Marianne. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language 60(4): 847–894. 

Munn, Alan & Schmitt, Cristina. 2005. Number and indefinites. Lingua 115: 821–855. 

Navarro, Ía. 2009. Predicados complejos con le en Español Mexicano. PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra.
Navarro, Ía & Espinal, M.Teresa. 2012.
Le-predicates and event modification in Mexican Spanish. Lingua 122: 409–431. 

Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. A Study of Subatomic Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Pylkkänen, Liina. 2002. Introducing Arguments. PhD Dissertation, MIT.
Rappaport Hovav, Malka & Levin, Beth. 1998. Building verb meanings. In The Projection of Arguments. Lexical and Compositional Factors, Miriam Butt & Wilhem Geuder (eds), 97–134. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Rosen, Sara Thomas. 1989. Two types of noun incorporation: A lexical analysis. Language 65: 294–317. 

Sadock, Jerrold. 1980. Noun incorporation in Greenlandic: A case of syntactic word formation. Language 56: 300–319. 

Sadock, Jerrold. 1986. Some notes on noun incorporation. Language 62: 19–31. 

Schmitt, Cristina. 1996. Aspect and the Syntax of Noun Phrases. PhD dissertation, University of Maryland.
Schmitt, Cristina & Munn, Alan. 1999. Against the nominal mapping parameter: Bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese. In Proceedings of NELS, Pius Ngwa Tamanji, Masako Hirotani & Nancy Hall (eds), 339–353. Amherst MA: GLSA.
Spencer, Andrew. 1995. Incorporation in Chukchi. Language 71(3): 439–489. 

Van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1998. Semantic Incorporation and Indefinite Descriptions: Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Zimmer, Karl. 1972. Appropriateness conditions for nominal compounds. Working Papers on Language Universals 8: 3–20.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.