Noun incorporation in English: A typological perspective

This paper gives a unified account of noun incorporation in Present-Day English from a constructional and typological perspective. We first investigate how productive it really is, given the contrasting statements in the literature. Using data from the WordBanks Online corpus, we show that the process is remarkably productive: it is highly extensible, with high type frequency and a broad variety of possible semantic relations between the incorporated noun and its incorporating verb. It is also a regular process, with noun incorporated verbs found in all possible forms, including finite ones. Second, since noun incorporation is productive in English, we investigate how it fits in existing typologies of noun incorporation, more specifically the one proposed by Mithun (1984). We show that types I (lexical compounding) and II (case manipulation) are uncompromisingly available in English, while type III (discourse manipulation) is restricted; type IV (classificatory incorporation) is attested even if not resulting in a fully-fledged nominal classification system. We argue that these differences relate to the typological profile of English, viz. as an analytic language with overtly expressed arguments, contrary to the polysynthetic languages studied by Mithun. The availability of types II-IV incidentally further substantiates the process’ productivity, since these typically develop later than type I. More generally, this study contributes to our understanding of noun incorporation and its characteristics in more analytic languages, which are understudied in this respect, and provides one of the few detailed, corpus-based studies of noun incorporation in an Indo-European language, where it is overall rare.