Chapter published in:

Verb Valency Changes: Theoretical and typological perspectives
Edited by Albert Álvarez González and Ia Navarro
[Typological Studies in Language 120] 2017
► pp. 32–49

Morphosyntactic defectiveness in complex predicate formation

M. Teresa Espinal | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

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.

Published online: 30 September 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.120.02esp

References

Baker, Mark

1988 Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

1996 The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: OUP.

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. http://www.semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WI2ZjZkM/pseudo-incorporation.pdf.

2011 Hindi pseudo incorporation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29: 123–167.

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.

2013 Bare nominals, bare predicates: Properties and related types. In New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 141], Johannes Kabatek & Albert Wall (eds), 63–94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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.

2007b Bare singulars: Variation at the syntax-semantics interface. Paper presented at the Workshop on Bare nouns and Nominalizations. Stuttgart: Universität Stuttgart.

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.

Haspelmath, Martin

1993 More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Causatives and Transitivity [Studies in Language Companion Series 21], Bernard Comrie & María Polinsky (eds), 87–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haugen, Jason D.

2007 Denominal verbs and noun incorporation. Uto-Aztecan evidence for a unified syntactic account. Texas Linguistics Society 9: 145–165.

2008 Morphology at the Interfaces. Reduplication and Noun Incorporation in Uto-Aztecan [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 117]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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.

Kozinsky, Isaac S., Vladimir P. Nedjalkov & Polinskaja, Maria S.

1988 Antipassive in Chukchee: Oblique object, object incorporation, zero object. In Passive and Voice [Typological Studies in Language 16], Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), 651–706. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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.

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

Cited by other publications

Mateu, Jaume

2017. In Verb Valency Changes [Typological Studies in Language, 120], ► pp. 52 ff.

Navarro, Ia

2017. In Verb Valency Changes [Typological Studies in Language, 120], ► pp. 108 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 april 2020. 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.