Article published in:
Word Formation in South American LanguagesEdited by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss and Fernando Zúñiga
[Studies in Language Companion Series 163] 2014
► pp. 11–31
Nominal compounds in Mapudungun
It is perhaps unsurprising that the rich agglutinative-polysynthetic verb morphology of Mapudungun has drawn most attention in linguistic studies. So far unnoticed in the literature are Mapudungun complex noun phrases, which show a puzzling distribution in terms of the internal structure they display. Some complex NPs are head-final (mapu-che ‘people of the land’). Others are head-initial, and of these a subset appears to be less lexicalized. In some cases, all three possibilities are found with the same components: mamüll-che ‘wood people’, che-mamüll ‘people made of wood’, and che mamüll ‘wood-like people’. The present paper reviews the comparatively modest literature on these phenomena, deals with them in an account based on semantic factors, and places them in a broader typological context. Keywords: Mapudungun; nominal compound; head-final; head-initial, nonhead; complex noun phrases; modification; subordination
Published online: 14 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.163.02zun
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.163.02zun
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