Wordhood and lexicality: Noun incorporation in Hindi

This paper examines the syntactic, semantic, morphological, and phonological properties of a certain type of noun-verb sequence in Hindi, and argues that it is an instance of noun incorporation. The sequence must be analysed as a lexical category; yet paradoxically, verb agreement and negation show that this noun is on par with a syntactically independent argument. The paper proposes a solution to this dual behaviour of the noun by recognizing grammatical categories and grammatical functions as belonging to distinct but co-present dimensions of syntactic representation. This factorization of dimensions yields an account of the facts of Hindi Incorporation which are not amenable to analysis in terms of head movement (Baker 1988) or coanalysis (Sadock 1991). When combined with the idea of different notions of wordhood, the dual representation leads to a distinction between categorial word and functional word, central to the untangling of numerous issues surrounding lexicality.

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