Noun incorporation

There is one more way in which morphology interacts with the argument structure of verbs. Consider the data in (11) from the Araucanian language Mapudungun:

Sentences (11a) and (11b) mean precisely the same thing in Mapudungun. In (11a), the direct object ‘cow’ is an independent noun phrase in the sentence, but in (11b), it forms a single compound-like word with the verb root ‘seek’. This sort of structure – where the object or another argument of the verb forms a single complex word with the verb – is called noun incorporation. Noun incorporation tends to occur in languages with polysynthetic morphology (see section 7.4). In Mapudungun, the object noun follows the verb root in both the incorporated and the unincorporated forms. But this need not be the case, as the example in (12) from the Iroquoian language Mohawk shows:

As (12a) shows, the direct object follows the verb when it occurs independently in Mohawk, but it precedes the verb when it is incorporated.

There is much discussion among morphologists and syntacticians whether noun incorporation should be explained as a result of morphological rules or syntactic rules.