Noun incorporation in a cross-linguistic perspective:The state of the art and future prospects
Noun incorporation(NI)was discovered when linguists and anthropologists explored American Indian languages on a large scale at the beginning of the 20th century.Since then,studies on NI have occupied an important position at various stages in the history of modem linguistics and have greatly advanced the theoretical build-up of morphology,syntax,and morphology-syntax interface.As the increasing amount of cross-linguistic data has attracted the attention of linguists,several new issues have emerged:1)What is the grammatical nature of incorporated structures?and 2)Is NI restricted to polysynthetic languages?If not,how can NI then be identified in an analytic language?3)What is the compositional mechanism of the NI?In-depth exploration of these issues has shifted the focus of inquiry from morphological to semantic incorporation and has given birth to a booming trend in research:the theory of semantic incorporation.Studies along this new line of thought have not only shed light on the boundary between morphology and syntax but have also provided new impetus to studies on interfaces and formal semantics.Studies on Chinese,in light of semantic incorporation,have greatly deepened our understanding of the nature of incorporated structures and enriched the typological description of NI.The theory of semantic incorporation provides an excellent window into unveiling the universal value adumbrated in the facts of Chinese and other languages in China,which is essential for Chinese linguistics to break away and"go beyond"the centralism of Indo-European frameworks and to make a greater contribution to the development of general linguistics.
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