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Some Notes on Noun Incorporation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Jerrold M. Sadock
Jerrold M. Sadock*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Abstract

Despite recent claims to the contrary, noun incorporation has an undeniable syntactic reality in some languages. In Greenlandic Eskimo and Southern Tiwa, the incorporated nominal displays many syntactic, semantic, and discourse-functional features of independent nominals—features which much recent work would lead us to doubt could characterize proper subparts of words. Linguistic theory must therefore allow for some limited interpenetration of the two modules of syntax and morphology.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 19 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the Spencer Foundation and the University of Chicago for financial support that enabled me to spend a year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Much of my knowledge of West Greenlandic comes from research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society, and the Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago; to all of these, I am also very grateful.

I would also like to thank Tony Woodbury for his generous help in the preparation of this paper, and absolve him of blame for misconceptions and misstatements it might contain. Sandra Chung and Geoffrey Pullum provided helpful comments.

References

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