Open AccessTongan noun incorporation: Lexical sharing or argument inheritance
Author(s) -
Douglas Ball
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2005.1
Subject(s) - noun , transitive relation , linguistics , computer science , syntax , argument (complex analysis) , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , lexical item , noun phrase , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , philosophy , combinatorics , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
As has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elementscan modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Twoanalysis are considered in this paper for understanding this constructionwithin HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views theverbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding totwo syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on thetransitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf(1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorialproperties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, andpreserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface.