Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
The Evolution of Noun Incorporation (Mithun)
Today's paper is written by Mariannne Mithun, a linguist who we've already been introduced to in this activity's first edition! This paper is about noun incorporation, a morphosyntactic process in which the verb forms a compound with one or more of its arguments, while still retaining its initial syntactic function. This notion is heavily associated with polysynthetic languages, but polysynthesis does not directly imply the presence of noun incorporation. There are also other types of incorporation such as adverbial incorporation, and one-word serial verb constructions could probably also be analyzed as a type of incorporation. Now onto today's prompts:
- Does your language feature noun incorporation? Can adverbs or verbs be incorporated as well?
- If so, how does it work? Does it fall into one of the types described by Mithun in her paper?
- Why would a speaker of your language prefer an incorporated argument over a non-incorporated argument? As in, what are the motivations for noun incorporation?
- If you considered diachronics while creating your language, how did (noun) incorporation evolve? Are there any interesting grammaticalization or lexicalization processes going on?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next saturday, and happy conlanging!