Re: Basque Gender Marking (was Re: Further language development Q's)

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 10:03:06 +0200, Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
wrote:

> (Btw, in English literature, is there
> distinction
> between terms "polysynthetic" and "incorporating"?)
Sometimes. Trask:

polysynthetic /pQlIsIn'TetIk/ adj. A label sometimes applied to word
froms, or to languages employing such word forms, consisting of an
unusually large number of bound morphemes, some of them with meanings or
functions that would be expressed by separate words in most other
languages. In a polysynthetic language, very often a complete sentence
seems to consist of a single such word. Polysynthetic languages are
particularly frequent in North America; the Iroquoian languages are
well-known examples. Müller (1880); earlier linguists had used the term
incorporating, but this last term is now usually given a more specific
meaning.

incorporation /In,kO:p@'reISn=/ n. 1. The grammatical process in which a
single inflected word form contains two or more lexical roots. In the
Siberian language Chukchi, for example, the English sentence 'the friends
put a net' can be expressed either without incorporation as "tumG-e
kupre-n na-nt@vat-G?an" friend-ERG net-ABS:SG PRT-put-3:PL->3:SG or in the
incorporated form "tumG-@t kopra-nt@vat-G?at" friend-ABS:PL net-put-3:PL,
in which the noun meaning 'net' has been incorporated into the verb.
Incorporation is not confined to object NPs; Chukchi also allows the
incorporation of various oblique NPs into the verb. 2. The realisation as
affixes of lexical morphemes the could alternatively be expressed as
separate words, there being no formal resemblance beteween the competing
bound and free realizations. An example is the Siberian Yupik Eskimo
sentence "aNja-Rl_0a-N-juG-tuq" boat-AUGM-acquire-want-3:SG 'he wants to
get a big boat'. This resembles the Chukchi case in that the morphemes
'acquire' and 'want' could instead be realised as separate words; it
differs in that the bound forms of 'acquire' and 'want' bear no formal
resemblance to the corresponding free forms, and hence the Eskimo sentence
is one word consisting of a single lexical root ("aNja-" 'boat') plus a
number of derivational and inflectional affixes. Note: Comrie (1981)
recommends that the term 'incorporation' be restricted only to the first
sense, but in practice it is widely used also for the second.





Paul