Re: THEORY: Incorporating Agents vs. Patients in Verbs (was: 'Yemls Grammar)

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:10:19 -0000, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...>
wrote:

>[QUESTIONS]
>1. How synonymous are the terms "incorporating languages"
>and "polysynthetic languages"?
I would have to say they are not at all synonymous. Johanna Mattissen has
an article in the current issue of Word on the typology of polysynthesis
and from a body of about 75 languages she states:

"polysynthesis is defined by
(i) the existence of complex, polymorphemic verb forms which allow, within
one word unit, for components in the form of non-root bound morphemes with
rather "lexical" meaning and optionally for concatenation of lexical roots,
(ii) with these components expressing several of the following categories:
event or participant classification and quantification, setting (eg 'in the
night'), location or direction, motion, instrument (eg 'by hand'), manner
(eg, 'by pulling', 'quickly'), modality (including evidentiality), degree,
scale (eg 'only', 'also') and focus, chronology (eg 'again', 'first') as
well as the usual categories, valence, voice, central participants, tense,
aspect (phase), mood, and polarity."

this is in contrast to Baker, who defines polysynthesis around noun-
incorporation & polypersonalism.

Mattissen further defines subtypes of polysynthetic languages, depending on
whether they include noun incorporation or verb root serialization (or both
or neither), and whether they are scope-order (eg Greenlandic, Kwakwala,
Capanahua) or templatic (eg Navaho, Tiwi, Wichita, Ket) or both (eg Nivkh,
Lakhota, Blackfoot, Maidu, Klamath).

Given the four characteristics (scope-ordering, templatic, noun
incorporating, and verb serializing) there are 12 potential types (omitting
languages that are neither scope-ordered nor templatic, since this bears on
how the requisite non-root bound morphemes behave), of which only the [+
scope-ordered, + noun-incorporating] type has no examples in her sample.

-Bfowol