Is Noun Incorporation a Discourse Variable in Yapese?

Seamless Morphology as a Heuristic for Productivity

Keira G. Ballantyne

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Cross linguistically, voice and transitivity alternations are exploited in order to suppress noun phrase arguments, to manipulate word order and to grant or withdraw prominence from discourse entities.  It is argued that speakers of Yapese, an Oceanic language of Micronesia, do not exploit noun incorporation as a discourse variable in Yapese. That is, unlike some other noun-incorporating languages, speakers of Yapese cannot access incorporation to manipulate the transitivity of a sentence.

For a morphosyntactic alternation such as noun incorporation to be a discourse variable, the alternation in question must be productive. Using the formal theoretical mechanisms of seamless morphology (Singh and Dasgupta 1999, Ford et. al. 1997, Starosta 1999, 2000), it is shown that noun incorporation is not productive in Yapese.

Seamless morphology holds that words are stored intact in the lexicon with no internal boundaries, and that word formation strategies (WFS) are a last resort for unfamiliar words. WFS are computed on the fly from analogical relationships between pairs of words already present in the lexicon.

Forty Yapese examples of noun incorporation are drawn from the Yapese English Dictionary (Jensen et al. 1977) as a sample lexicon. It is shown that no productive analogical pairs can be discerned within this data set. Thus, Yapese speakers do not have access to the analogical relationships acquired to generate novel noun incorporations, and are therefore highly unlikely to have access to noun incorporation as a discourse variable.

References

Ford, Alan, Rajendra Singh & Gita Martohardjono. 1997. Pace Panini: Towards a Word-based Theory of Morphology. New York: Peter Lang.

Singh, Rajendra and Probal Dasgupta. 1999. On So-called Compounds. In Rajendra Singh, Probal Dasgupta and K. P. Mohanan (eds.) The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. New Delhi, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Starosta, Stanley. 1999. Do compounds have internal structure? A seamless analysis. Available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~stanley/cmpdsmls.rtf (Dec 2000).

Starosta, Stanley. 2000. Micronesian Noun Incorporation: a seamless analysis. To appear in Rajendra Singh and Stanley Starosta (eds.) Explorations in Seamless Morphology.