West Circassian polysynthesis at the morphology-syntax interface
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4328Keywords:
morphology-syntax interface, noun incorporation, polysynthesis, word formation, head movement, syntax-prosody interface, West CircassianAbstract
This paper presents an analysis of word formation in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language. I argue that while verbs and nouns superficially share a similar morphological profile, they are in fact constructed through two distinct word formation strategies: while verbal morphology is concatenated via syntactic head movement, the noun phrase is pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for this two-fold approach to word formation comes from morpheme ordering in nominalizations.Downloads
Published
2018-03-03
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Section
Articles
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.
How to Cite
Ershova, Ksenia. 2018. “West Circassian Polysynthesis at the Morphology-Syntax Interface”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 3 (1): 39:1–15. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4328.