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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

| 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.

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