A Lexical Account of Noun Incorporation in Chukchi

This paper is concerned with noun incorporation (NI) in Chukchi, a Kamchatkan language spoken in Siberia. The data discussed are taken from two papers on this subject, namely Polinsky (1990) and Spencer (1995). This amount of data is of course extremely restricted, but I attempt to give an insight into the phenomenon and its theoretical solution rather than discuss it thoroughly on the basis of many different sources. In the following paragraph I will give a brief introduction into the characteristics of the Chukchi language in general and its NI structures in particular. Paragraph 3 will deal with two previous analyses on the subject of NI, a syntactic and a semantic approach; I will show that they cannot account for all of the Chukchi data. Subsequently, in paragraph 4, I will present the framework of my analysis, Lexical Decomposition Grammar. This semantically oriented theory makes use of the two basic operations Functional Application and Functional Composition, and it will show that, with these mechanisms, the Chukchi data can be explained.