Two Types of Syntactic Noun Incorporation: Noun Incorporation in Mapudungun and its Typological Implications

Abstract

Noun incorporation (NI) in Mapudungun is different from NI in better-studied languages like Mohawk in three ways: the incorporated noun is invisible to verbal agreement, incorporation into unaccusative verbs is impossible unless a possessor is stranded, and possessors are the only modifiers that can be stranded. These differences can be explained by saying that the trace of NI retains its person, number, and gender features in Mohawk but not in Mapudungun. Those aspects of grammar that do not involve these features treat NI in the two languages the same; thus, NI has the same gross distribution and anaphoric possibilities in both languages. We extend these results to Nahuatl, Chukchee, Ainu, Southern Tiwa, Mayali, and Wichita, showing that our theory accounts for Mithun’s (1984) distinction between Type III and Type IV noun incorporation in a general way.