From Individuation to Cumulativity: the noun incorporation in Tenetehára (Tupí-Guaraní)

Abstract

To express individuation and cumulativity, natural languages present a significant diversity of grammatical mechanisms that involve lexical, morphological, and syntactic strategies. We intend to demonstrate that, in the Tenetehára language (Tupí-Guaraní), noun incorporation is one of these resources. In this regard, we discuss the syntactic operation of incorporation, which expresses a low degree of individuation of the incorporated term, in addition to resulting in nouns with a cumulative interpretation. Although, for example, there are no articles in this language that can denote definiteness or specificity, non-incorporated objects present a greater degree of individuation when they are contrasted with their incorporated versions. The analysis proposed here is based on elicited linguistic data that comprise the two strategies of noun incorporation in this language: (i) noun incorporation with valence reduction, which involves incorporation of the object of transitive verbs; and (ii) incorporation without valence reduction, which concerns the incorporation of the possessed constituent of noun phrases in the syntactic function of subject of intransitive verbs and object of transitive verbs.