LINGUIST List 14.1796

Fri Jun 27 2003

Qs: VVCC Syllables; Multiple Noun Incorporation

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Andrew Horne, VVCC superheavy syllables
2. Federico Damonte, Multiple noun incorporation

I am looking for languages with morphologically simplex superheavy
syllables of the format VVCC e.g. English bold, find etc. This
structure appears to be extremely rare cross-linguistically and many
apparent cases turn out to involve either morphological boundaries (as
in dine-d) or alternating epenthetic forms i.e. (arguably) an
underlying VVCVC structure e,g. Somali maalim day, maalm-o days.

I would be grateful for information on any languages which have
(underlying) VVCC superheavies and for which, ideally, data is readily
available. I am particularly interested in any correspondence between
the occurrence of such forms and phonetically identical
morphologically complex forms e.g. English bold v. bowl-ed; find
v. fine-d etc.

Many thanks

Andrew Horne
SOAS 

I have been trying to understand to what extent, and in which
laguages, multiple noun incorporation into the verb is possible, but
from the grammars of polysnthetic language and the literature on
incorporation I wasn't able to pin down the two following facts:

1) It seems that most cases of multiple noun incorporation reported in
the literature include a causative form of the verb, and one of the
incorporated nouns is the embedded subject. Is multiple noun
incorporation possible without the verb having a causative morpheme?

2) More precisely, is incorporation of (at least) two adjuncts (say an
instrument and locative) possible in any polysynthetic language? And,
in case, can such incorporation exclude the direct object, so that the
object is a non-incorporated phrase?

Thanks in anticipation,

Federico Damonte