West Circassian polysynthesis at the morphology-syntax interface

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of word formation in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language. I argue that while verbs and nouns superficially share a similar morphological profile, they are in fact constructed through two distinct word formation strategies: while verbal morphology is concatenated via syntactic head movement, the noun phrase is pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for this two-fold approach to word formation comes from morpheme ordering in nominalizations.

Arabic as a Polysynthetic Language: Evidence From the Holy Qur’an

“…In this section, the researchers discuss six of the previous studies from the very rich literature on topics related to the one under investigation in this piece of research (e.g., Kibrik, 1992;Itkonen, 1999;Ershova, 2018;Kelly et al, 2014;Kell, 2014;Ebata, 2020 among others). Kibrik (1992), who is concerned with the formation of relative constructions, claims that the markedness of all arguments on the verb is the most crucial trait of polysynthetic languages.…”

“…The study of Ershova (2018) provides that Circassian verb morphology is polysynthetic and verb syntax is based on morphology. This observation suggests that at the morpho-syntax interface, simple functional words are being constructed from simple morphemes in a head-fixing, prefixing manner.…”

“…In the opinion of the researcher, this is possible because of a complex morpho-syntax interface in Circassian. Ershova (2018) provides that the object is placed after the first verb because it is more important than other verbs (in term of its position). In addition to that, the researcher demonstrates this by going to school and giving to students certain vocabularies that are specific to that activity.…”