Re: Telek Verbs

Marcus Smith wrote:

>There are some restrictions on noun incorporation.  First of all, objects of
>instrumental and general location/motion applicatives cannot incorporate.
>This
>is undoubtedly connected to the fact that they also do not trigger agreement
>with their objects.  The other major point is that the incorporated noun
>cannot
>be definite.  When someone "deer-cooks" they are cooking "a deer" not "the
>deer".  The incorporated noun cannot have any morphology attached.
This appears to be contradicted by your example of intransitive subject
incorporation, "aba'-axin", which you gloss as "THE pole is red".  Is
the gloss incorrect (it should be "a pole is red" or "there's a red pole"),
or are intransitive subjects an exception?

>I'm stuck with that last point.  Anything that is possessed is definite.  This
>would mean that inalienably possessed things cannot be incorporated.  I really
>think the expression "have a headache" contains the verb "head-hurt", but
>"head" is inalienably possessed.  I'm also pretty sure that I cannot say
>"for-my-mother-cook".  I'm not sure of a good place to draw the line between
>what can and what cannot incorporate.    Does anybody have any idea about
>how I
>can resolve this?
One place to draw the line would be between inalienably possessed nouns
which stand in a part-to-whole relation to the possessor (body parts,
abstract properties) and inalienably possessed nouns which denote
a separate entity bearing a particular relation to the posessor (kinship
terms, etc.).  Perhaps the former can incorporate but the latter
can't.  Having a syntactic difference between part-to-whole and
relational possession which cross-cuts the morphological difference
between alienable and inalienable possession might be a nice (certainly
realistic) feature to have in Telek.

Matt.