Incorporation

Abstract

AbstractIncorporation describes the morphophonological integration of the form of a lexical category into a full‐fledged verb form. It is a heterogeneous phenomenon that has to be described language‐specifically, through a range of parameters at all descriptional levels, in both form and function. The present entry illustrates these parameters with an in‐depth study of Nivkh, which features several theoretically relevant conditions on incorporation. In Nivkh, the incorporated forms, called ‘incorporees’, are syntactically and referentially active, and incorporation is the central means of undergoer argument encoding when primary object (including complement) and verb have the same information value.