Abstract
Newly elicited data from Mohawk, an Iroquoian language still spoken in six communities of New York, Quebec, & Ontario, are analyzed in support of a claim that all forms of noun incorporation in Mohawk constitute a process of word formation. Mohawk noun incorporation generally takes the form of an intransitive or transitive verb in which a noun stem denoting a backgrounded semantic patient immediately precedes the verb root; person-marking prefixes apply to the resulting lexical compound & never corefer to the incorporated item, which therefore is neither a syntactic argument nor in apposition to a pronominal argument. Mark Baker's distinction between lexical & syntactic types of incorporation in Mohawk is shown not to have a sound empirical basis, as (1) syntactic tests used by Baker necessarily involve animate incorporation, which is marginal in Mohawk, & (2) his external argument alternatives differ significantly in information structure from incorporation. Morpheme-specific variation in the productivity, acceptability, & grammatical & semantic transparency of incorporations provides further support for their lexical status in Mohawk. 24 References. J. Hitchcock