Abstract
Construction Grammar is a model of grammar which makes a virtue out of treating morphological and syntactic constructions as varieties of essentially the same ontological type, which is also the type of words in general: a lexical entry. I argue that this kind of model is exactly what we need to describe the otherwise troublesome behaviour of polysynthetic languages. In particular, this model enables us to derive the kind of prosodic constituency and semantic interpretation which is otherwise completely unexpected for words.
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Notes
- 1.
Except where otherwise indicated, examples are taken from the author’s fieldnotes. I use IPA to represent utterances, and Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel et al. 2008) with the following non-obvious additions: 1: 1st person exclusive; 12: 1st person inclusive; evit: evitative; fneg: Future Negative; fut.p: Future Punctual; mult: multiplicative; pc: Past Continuous; pp.: Past Punctual; np: Non-Past. All the languages discussed here have systems of exhaustive noun classification into between 4 and 7 classes represented by the glosses fem(inine/female), masc(uline/male), neut(er), veg(etable), anim(imate), coll(ective). Due to the complexities of Wubuy phonology, the first line in some Wubuy examples indicates the surface phonology, the line underneath represents the underlying forms of morphemes. Where examples have a single language line, this is because the surface phonology doesn’t depart radically from the underlying morphology.
- 2.
Incorporation is only a feature of the central and eastern Gunwinyguan languages: Bininj Gun-wok/Gunwinygu/Mayali, Dalabon, Rembarrnga, Ngalakgan, Ngandi, Wubuy/Nunggubuyu and Enindhilyakwa/Anindilyakwa. The western languages, such as Jawoyn and Warray, do not have productive incorporation or nominal compounding as described here.
- 3.
- 4.
Ngalakgan ['ŋalakkan], was formerly spoken in the Wilton River drainage basin of southern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and the adjoining region of the Roper River valley. It is now effectively moribund. Data reported here comes from my own fieldwork on the language and (Baker 2008a).
- 5.
Note that I am using the term ‘compound’ throughout this chapter in an agnostic fashion, interchangeably with ‘incorporation’, as a combination of two lexical roots or stems. However, as discussed briefly below, compounds in GN languages have different semantics to compounds in English, German and other languages (and see Baker 2008a, 2014 for more discussion). Verb stems in small caps indicate the independent meanings of finite verbs when used in lexicalised compounds (where the verb may or may not contribute compositionally to the meaning of the compound), as in waɳa+kana hold+take.pres ‘have’ in example (6).
- 6.
In formal terms, standard compounds of the English ‘blackbird’ kind would be of type ‘e’ (references to entities), while compounds in Gunwinyguan languages have a more complex type that could be expressed in lambda calculus as λx.px ‘That referent (x) which has the attribute p’.
- 7.
Ngalakgan has no lexicalised N+Adj compounds. Both Bininj Gun-wok and Wubuy, however, possess a small number of lexicalised (i.e. having unpredictable denotations) exocentric compounds referring to natural species, such as Wubuy ŋuta-l̪art̪ark ‘King brown snake’ (lit. ‘midriff-rough’), ɻapara-wuɭma ‘black whip snake’ (ɻapara ‘tail’; wuɭma does not otherwise occur). Such forms are rare. The main exception to the general semantic transparency of compounds in Gunwinyguan languages is constituted by names. In brief, placenames in Ngalakgan and many other Australian languages can consist of morphologically complex forms such as locative suffixed nouns, or inflected verbs, which have specific referents in the landscape and to individuals bearing those names as personal names (Baker 2002). Since these names are formed through a range of morphological means, including simple nouns, they do not diminish the point made here.
- 8.
However, a number of verbs and adjectives in Wubuy require a bodypart argument or else a ‘dummy’ incorporated stem to be incorporated; see Heath (1984: 469). For example, verbs such as waja- ‘to be hurting’ and waɭka- ‘to be afflicted by’ are normally produced by speakers either with a specific incorporated body part or else with the ‘dummy’ incorporated noun wara- which can have the meaning ‘all over’, or can simply stand for a lack of specification of a more specific on-the-body location. Similar behaviour has also been described for Bininj Gun-Wok (Evans 2003: 331) and the Southern Daly language Murrinh-Patha (Forshaw 2011).
- 9.
A reviewer questions whether it is indeed the incorporated noun being modified in such examples, drawing attention to the fact that incorporation could be regarded as a kind of copying rule (since quite often the same noun appears both incorporated and externally) and in that case, given the well-known characteristic of non-configurational languages that NPs may be covert, the modifier could then be regarded as modifying the covert NP instead. The second part of this proposal appears to be unfalsifiable, since it appeals to covert linguistic items which will leave no trace in the syntax. However, reasons to dismiss the first part (copying) are provided in Heath (1984: 464): (1) there are a number of suppletive pairs (as discussed above), or other morphological or semantic differences between independent and incorporated forms; (2) most nouns cannot be incorporated at all; (3) even when incorporation is possible, it is normally optional, so we still have to explain why/when it occurs; (4) there is no straightforward way of predicting which argument might incorporate or, conversely, what relation the incorporated noun has to the event structure (see Baker 2014).
- 10.
Bininj Gun-Wok examples are presented in the orthography of the source (Evans 2003).
- 11.
Alternatively, the utterances initialised with mari ‘and’ could be regarded as a kind of afterthought construction akin to phrases with English ‘and furthermore’. In practice, it is difficult to know which is the appropriate analysis for each case (see Heath 1984: 540).
- 12.
The reasons for regarding N-Adj compounds in Gunwinyguan languages as category A, rather than category N, are discussed in Baker and Nordlinger (2008). In brief, in Bininj Gun-wok, which distinguishes between gender on heads and gender on modifiers, N-Adj compounds agree for gender like the corresponding adjective, rather than showing the gender appropriate to the corresponding noun. In addition, in all Gunwinyguan languages with incorporation, N-Adj can take verbal subject agreement and tense-aspect-mood morphology, which is not available to the kinds of nouns which can be incorporated. In short then, their morphological characteristics follow if they are treated as adjectives.
- 13.
This behaviour could be captured in terms of the largely unproductive constructional schemas suggested by Booij and Audring (this volume) which, as in (15), associate a whole word form with a single meaning.
- 14.
Except that coverbs belonging to the largest verb class, the open conjugation taking mi- as a finite verb, appear to have a high degree of salience, in that their meanings can be discussed by speakers, they always constitute Prosodic Words, and they can sometimes be ‘excorporated’ from the complex verb and occur preposed, or even independently; see (Baker and Harvey 2003).
- 15.
These languages principally include Ngalakgan, Ngandi, Marra, and Wubuy. All except Marra are incorporating, polysynthetic and probable members of the Gunwinyguan family. Note that this behaviour cannot be attributed to literacy: the majority of the speakers of these languages are functionally illiterate. Only a small number of Wubuy speakers have acquired literacy in the language.
- 16.
I am aware of no research which specifically targets ‘pedagogic’ productions of this kind, so at this stage I can only speculate about what it tells us.
- 17.
The only position where pauses are dispreferred but where the constituents on each side might be said to carry meaning is that between a verb root and its inflection. There are notable differences, however, between this juncture and the ‘legal’ junctures described here: tense inflection never functions as a metrical domain in Wubuy or the other languages described here; the root or stem to which tense inflections attach never occurs on its own (without overt tense morphology) in Wubuy; and the tense inflections themselves are highly specific to particular conjugations of verbs (of which there are around 26 identified by Heath 1984: 407ff). All of these factors conspire to make verb roots/stems rather opaque in Wubuy and in many other Australian languages (see Baker and Harvey 2003).
- 18.
The noun mol ‘a sore, pustule’ counts as a bodypart for this purpose, as in Bininj Gun-wok. Similarly with other nouns having denotations that are classified as parts of humans such as ‘shadow’, ‘name’, ‘footprint’ and so on.
- 19.
I have used tree diagrams rather than labelled brackets here simply for ease of visualisation, but as usual these are translateable into the labelled bracket notation used in Booij (2010).
- 20.
Thanks to Thomas Britz for discussion on this point. More generally, we can say that a word with n optionally filled slots in its template will have 2n possible word template configurations.
- 21.
One possible reflection of the scope differences among nominal inflections is their distribution in agreement. For Australian languages with gender systems, which are by far the minority, agreement for gender amongst constituents of NPs is the norm. Case agreement is also very common, though not especially among Non-Pama-Nyungan languages (see Dench and Evans 1988). Number agreement seems to be less common, although I am aware of no survey on this. I am aware of no instances of agreement for pronominal possessors (beyond the noun indicating possession itself) among Australian languages. These agreement differences reflect the relative scope differences among these elements captured schematically in (31), and deserve further scrutiny than can be afforded them here.
- 22.
The rule-to-rule hypothesis can simply be characterised like so: “for every syntactic rule within the grammar, a corresponding semantic rule must be stated which specifies how structures of the sort analyzed by that rule are to be interpreted” (Gazdar 1985: 206). In this case, we would say that whatever produces the characteristic interpretations of nouns modified by adjectives in English (e.g. McNally and Kennedy 2008), something similar must also apply to the interpretation of N-Adj compounds in Ngalakgan and Wubuy.
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Baker, B. (2018). Super-Complexity and the Status of ‘Word’ in Gunwinyguan Languages of Australia. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_10
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