West Greenlandic noun incorporation in a monohierarchical theory of grammar

The resulting denominal verb (dv) has the full syntactic and morphological distribution of any verb in West Greenlandic. It also retains some of the properties of the incorporated nominal (in), which has led some researchers to analyze this construction as a kind of ni and to argue that it represents a structural mismatch between syntax and morphology. In this paper, I will present an alternative hpsg analysis of West Greenlandic dvs as a mixed category construction that shares some of the properties of both verbs and nouns. A dv can head a clause like any other verb can. West Greenlandic is an ergative language, so a dv can govern an absolutive argument and, if transitive, an ergative argument. Unlike a verb, though, a dv can also occur with arguments that are characteristic of nouns. For example, nouns can take a possessor in the ergative case: