Noun incorporation is defined as a construction where obligatorily bare (i.e. articleless, numberless, modifierless) nouns must occur adjacent to or inside of the verb, in a fixed order. This feature essentially asks whether transitive verbs may be rendered intransitive by means of noun incorporation, and whether this process is productive. This need not be the default way of intransitivizing verbs, but the process must be productive. The incorporated noun in the construction of interest for this feature is semantically an argument of the verb. For example: he was painting the bike = he was bike-painting. Noun incorporation where the relevant noun functions as an adjunct or modifier does not count, e.g. she was running like Jacob runs = she was Jacob-running. A construction where it is necessary to overtly represent the relevant argument with an additional form other than the incorporated noun, for example with a pronoun, also does not count.
Comanche (ISO 639-3: com, Glottolog: coma1245)
Comanche noun incorporation intransitivizes a verb, and is commonly used to express habitual activities. The incorporated noun must be a bare root with no number or case marking (Charney 1993: 123). Comanche would be coded 1.
Noun Incorporation
[pukumakwIɁetɨ urɨɨ] puku-makwih-Ɂe-tɨɨ=utɨɨ horse-chase-DISTR-PL=3PL ‘They're chasing horses.’ (Charney 1993: 123) (notes: DISTR = distributive aspect; glosses adapted)
Non-incorporated Direct Object
[ehka nɨɨ waɁóɁa makwIɁepɨnnitƗ] eHka nɨɨ waɁóɁ-a makwih-Ɂe-h/H/pɨnni-tɨ= those.O 1SG cat-O chase-DISTR-IPFV-PROG ‘I'm chasing the cats.’ (Charney 1993: 123)
Kuuk Thaayorre (ISO 639-3: thd, Glottolog: thay1249)
There are a number of verbal forms in Kuuk Thaayorre that include a body part noun and a verbal root, as shown in the example below.
bottle table-ak thaa+raaki-rr bottle(ACC) table-DAT mouth+PLACE-P.PFV ‘she put the bottle on the table’ (Gaby 2006: 432)
While the nominal components of these noun + verb compounds in Kuuk Thaayorre can transparently represent theme arguments of the verb (e.g. koo-mi'i nose-pick.up = ‘recognize (someone's face)’, Gaby 2006: 433), they do not meet the other criteria for this feature. First, this construction is attested with a small number of body part terms and it is unclear how productive it is. Second, the valency of the verb is unaffected by this construction (Gaby 2006: 432). Kuuk Thaayorre is coded 0.
Baker, Mark C. 1988. Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Caballero, Gabriella, Michael J. Houser, Nicole Marcus, Teresa McFarland, Anne Pycha, Maziar Toosarvandani & Johanna Nichols. 2008. Nonsyntactic ordering effects in noun incorporation. Linguistic Typology 12: 383–421.
Gerdts, Donna. 1998. Incorporation. In Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky (eds), The handbook of morphology, 84–100. London: Blackwell.
Mithun, Marianne. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language 60: 847–894.
Mithun, Marianne. 1986. On the nature of noun incorporation. Language 62: 32–37.
deReuse, Willem. 1994. Noun incorporation. In Ronald Asher (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2842–2847. Oxford: Pergamon.
Charney, Jean Ormsbee. 1993. A grammar of Comanche. (Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Gaby, Alice Rose. 2006. A grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. (Doctoral dissertation.)
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| 0 | absent | 1390 | |
| 1 | present | 270 | |
| ? | Not known | 724 |
| Name | Glottocode | Family | Macroarea | Contributor | Value | Source | Comment |
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