Incorporation (linguistics)


Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. The inclusion of a noun qualifies the verb, narrowing its scope rather than making reference to a specific entity.
Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, Siberia and northern Australia. However, polysynthesis does not necessarily imply incorporation ; neither does the presence of incorporation in a language imply that that language is polysynthetic.

Examples of incorporation

English

Although incorporation does not occur regularly, English uses it sometimes: breastfeed, and direct object incorporation, as in babysit. Etymologically, such verbs in English are usually back-formations: the verbs breastfeed and babysit are formed from the adjective breast-fed and the noun babysitter respectively. Incorporation and plain compounding may be fuzzy categories: consider backstabbing, name-calling, axe murder.

Oneida

The following example from Oneida illustrates noun incorporation.
In this example, the verbal root hninu appears with its usual verbal morphology: a factive marker, which very roughly translates as past tense, although this is not quite accurate; an agreement marker, which tells us that the verb agrees with 1st person singular ; and an aspect marker, punctual, which tells us that this is a completed event. The direct object ne kanaktaʼ follows the verb. The function of the particle ne is to determine the bed: in the example, I bought this specific bed. Note that the word for bed consists of a root nakt plus a prefix and a suffix. The notion of the root is important here, but the properties of the prefix and suffix do not matter for this discussion.
In the following sentence, the bed is unspecified. Unspecified nouns can be incorporated, thus creating a general statement. In this example: I bought a bed. In a broader sense, depending on context, it can even mean that I am a bed buyer, as in: I am a trader of beds, buying beds is my profession.
In this example, the root for bed nakt has incorporated into the verbal construction and appears before the verbal root. Two other incidental changes are noticed here. First, the agreement marker in the first example is k and in the second example is ke. These are two phonologically-conditioned allomorphs. In other words, the choice between using k and ke is based on the other sounds in the word. Also, there is an epenthetic vowel a between the nominal and verbal roots. This vowel is inserted to break up an illegal consonant cluster.

Panare

The next example, from Panare, illustrates the cross-linguistically common phenomenon that the incorporated form of a noun may be significantly different from its unincorporated form. The first sentence contains the incorporated form u' of "head", and the second its unincorporated form ipu:

Chukchi

, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language spoken in North Eastern Siberia, provides a wealth of examples of noun incorporation. The phrase təpelarkən qoraŋə means "I'm leaving the reindeer" and has two words. The same idea can be expressed with the single word təqorapelarkən, in which the noun root qora- "reindeer" is incorporated into the verb word.

Mohawk

, an Iroquoian language, makes heavy use of incorporation, as in: watia'tawi'tsherí:io "it is a good shirt", where the noun root atia'tawi "upper body garment" is present inside the verb.

Cheyenne

, an Algonquian language of the plains, also uses noun incorporation on a regular basis. Consider nátahpe'emaheona, meaning "I have a big house", which contains the noun morpheme maheo "house".

Chinese (Mandarin)

makes extensive use of verb-object compounds, which are compounds composed of two constituents having the syntactic relation of verb and its direct object. For example, the verb shuì-jiào 睡覺 'sleep ' is composed of the verb shuì 睡 'sleep ' and the bound morpheme object jiào 覺 'sleep '. Aspect markers, classifier phrases, and other elements may separate the two constituents of these compounds, though different verb-object compounds vary in degree of separability.

Semantics of noun incorporation

In many cases, a phrase with an incorporated noun carries a different meaning with respect to the equivalent phrase where the noun is not incorporated into the verb. The difference seems to hang around the generality and definiteness of the statement. The incorporated phrase is usually generic and indefinite, while the non-incorporated one is more specific.
In Yucatec Maya, for example, the phrase "I chopped a tree", when the word for "tree" is incorporated, changes its meaning to "I chopped wood". In Lahu, the definite phrase "I drink the liquor" becomes the more general "I drink liquor" when "liquor" is incorporated. The Japanese phrase 目を覚ます me o samasu means "to wake up" or literally to wake eyes. But when the direct object is incorporated into the nominal form of the verb, the resulting noun 目覚まし mezamashi literally means "waking up", as in 目覚まし時計　mezamashidokei meaning "alarm clock."
This tendency is not a rule. There are languages where noun incorporation does not produce a meaning change.

Syntax of noun incorporation

Noun incorporation usually deletes one of the arguments of the verb, and in some languages this is shown explicitly. That is, if the verb is transitive, the verb word with an incorporated direct object becomes formally intransitive and marked as such. In other languages this change does not take place, or at least it is not shown by explicit morphology.
In Lakhota, a Siouan language of the plains, for example, the phrase "the man is chopping wood" can be expressed either as a transitive wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe or as an intransitive wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe in which the independent nominal čháŋ, "wood," becomes a root incorporated into the verb: "wood-chopping."
The noun may not be deleted after all. In the Oneida language, one finds classifier noun incorporation, in which a generic noun acting as a direct object can be incorporated into a verb, but a more specific direct object is left in place. In a rough translation, one would say for example "I animal-bought this pig", where "animal" is the generic incorporated noun. Note that this "classifier" is not an actual classifier but a common noun.

Incorporation in diachronic perspective

As proposed by Mithun, one of the major origins of incorporation is coalescence between noun and verb. Another proposed origin is the denominal derivation of a nominal compound containing a noun root and a verb root.
In 1985, Mithun also introduced a four type system to define the functionality and progression of noun incorporation in a language. The first and simplest type, known as lexical compounding, involves a verb incorporating a nominal argument. The resulting compound usually describes a noteworthy or recurring activity. The second type uses the same process to manipulate case roles, incorporating the argument into the verb to allow for a new argument to take its place. Type III uses noun incorporation to background old or established information. A speaker might explicitly mention an entity once, for example, and thereafter refer to it using an incorporated verbal compound. The fourth and final type proposed by Mithun involves the development of a set of classificatory compounds, in which verbs are paired with generic nouns to describe properties of an entity, rather than the entity itself. This type was previously mentioned as a feature of the Oneida language.
According to Mithun, languages exhibiting any of these types always display all of the lower types as well. This seems to imply a pattern of progression, as Mithun describes in her 1984 paper on the evolution of noun incorporation.
Incorporation can in its turn change into other constructions, such as denominal derivation, applicative, directional affixes