Minhast/Noun Incorporation: Difference between revisions

The pattern of truncation is unpredictable; syllable loss may occur in initial, medial, or final positions, although noun roots with more than two syllables tend to lose either their medial or final syllables and retain the initial syllable, but exceptions abound, such as ''allāga'' > ''-lgagg-'' (conch) .

n many languages which exhibit noun incorporation, the type of noun that can be incorporated into the verb is often restricted.  Some languages incorporate body parts only, others are restricted to inalienable nouns or some other semantic category.  Other languages that exhibit extensive noun incorporation, of which Mohawk and its relatives in the Iroquoian language family are the most studied, while having much fewer semantic restrictions, still limit the syntactic or thematic role of the noun that can be incorporated: these are that of the Patient argument, and in some cases the Instrument argument.  Other arguments serving in a different thematic/theta role are barred from incorporation.  Other noun incorporating languages, such as Chukchi, appear to have no restrictions on the theta role of the incorporated noun (IN); but when these oblique nouns are incorporated, the only way to recover their thematic role is by context alone.