Incorporation (linguistics)

In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) 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 (Mithun 2009), and the presence of incorporation does not imply that the 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 (Iroquoian) illustrates noun incorporation.

In this example, the verbal root hninu appears with its usual verbal morphology: a factive marker (FACT), which very roughly translates as past tense, although this is not quite accurate; an agreement marker (1.SG), which tells us that the verb agrees with 1st person singular (the speaker); and an aspect marker, punctual (PUNC), 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. 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 (and not a specific 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 (and has nothing to do with noun incorporation). Also, there is an epenthetic vowel a between the nominal and verbal roots. This vowel is inserted to break up an illegal consonant cluster (and also has nothing to do with noun incorporation).

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 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 verb in the first person singular, and the noun). 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 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 Cheyenne, an Algonquian language of the Great 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) Chinese 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 (VO)' is composed of the verb shuì 睡 'sleep (V)' and the bound morpheme object jiào 覺 'sleep (N)'. Aspect markers (e.g. 了 le PERFECTIVE), classifier phrases (e.g. 三個鐘頭 sān ge zhōngtóu THREE + CL + hours), and other elements may separate the two constituents of these compounds, though different verb-object compounds vary in degree of separability.

Turkish The verb etmek in Turkish always has an incorporated noun object: it cannot occur without one. For example, the noun yardım means "help"; the verbal complex yardım etmek means "to help", with the person being helping occurring in the dative case, e.g. bana yardım etti "s/he helped me", with the first person singular pronoun ben "I" in the dative case bana "to me". The verb kaybetmek evolved from kayıp etmek (both mean "to lose"); kayıp means "loss"; kayıp olmak "to be lost" evolved into kaybolmak.

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