Noun incorporation and the Mohawk lexicon

Mohawk, like many North American languages, seems to do in its morphology what more familiar languages do in their syntax. When faced with such a language, the linguist is forced to reconsider some basic notions. Do we ignore the apparent parallels between syntactic and morphological processes and continue to treat them diierently, or do we push syntax down below the word level? What is the division of labor between the lexical and syntactic components of the grammar? One phenomenon which has been at the center of this debate for nearly a century is Mohawk noun incorporation. Noun incorporation is described as \the combination into one word of the noun object and the verb functioning as the predicate of a sentence" (Kroeber 1908, 569). As such, it is a process which seems to sit on the boundary between morphology and syntax. But, as Sapir (1911) notes, \noun incorporation is primarily either a morphological or syntactic process; the attempt to put it under two rubrics at the same time necessarily leads to a certain amount of artiiciality of treatment" (255). Sapir argues that in most cases, noun incorporation is no more a syntactic process than is nominalization in English. Even in languages, such as Mohawk, where it seems most like a syntactic process, Sapir claimed it was still \a purely non-syntactic or etymological process, the morphological equivalent of a logically syntactic one" (278). Apparently his arguments were convincing, as Kroeber (1911) concedes \Here is the crux of the whole problem and its answer: noun incorporation is not grammatical but etymological" (580). This, however, did not put the question to rest. As Sapir's `artiiciality' gave way to the generative grammarian's `abstractness', it once again became possible to consider incorporation as a syntactic process with morphological eeects rather than as a morphological process with syntactic eeects. In this paper I will review some of the analyses of Mohawk noun incorporation that have been proposed. I will also ooer a lexical analysis, situated in a general theory of grammar, which is an attempt to synthesize some of the diierent viewpoints.