Re: THEORY: Polysynthetic languages - used in a sentence?

From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> > Yes.  What's more amazing is that IIRC in Greenlandic, which is
> > closely related, incorporated nouns may be referential and even
> > introduced as such in the discourse, contrary to a lot of functionalist
> > literature.
>
> Really? So for instance you can incorporate the argument of an
> intransitive verb?
There are languages that do this, yes, but I'm not certain if
Greenlandic does this. For such languages, they tend strongly
only to do so with unaccusative intransitives.

> That's really interesting.... what I've read always
> gave me the impression as you say that incorporated nouns couldn't be
> referential, much as "I go fox-hunting" is acceptable in English, but
> not "I go that-fox-over-there-hunting".
It's not that the whole NP gets incorporated; just the head.  The
dependents get left hanging, separately. These are normally cited
as prima facie examples of syntactic incorporation, also contrary
to the functionalist stance (Georgian, too, has some nonproductive
examples of this.)

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