Tongan noun incorporation: Lexical sharing or argument inheritance

Abstract

As has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elements can modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Two analysis are considered in this paper for understanding this construction within HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views the verbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding to two syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on the transitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf (1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorial properties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, and preserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface.