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
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