Schedule 74. StuTS

Baker's "Polysynthesis Parameter" offers a generativist definition for the phenomenon of polysynthesis.
In my bachelor's thesis, I aimed to find out whether the Yeniseic language Ket fits into this concept. (Spoiler: It doesn't, but Ket still rocks.)

In the linguistic landscape of Siberia, the Yeniseian languages and Ket, their only surviving
representative, are "exotic". Despite numerous attempts to prove relationships to other
languages or language families, they have so far been considered isolates. Ket has several
typological peculiarities that make it an interesting object of research for comparative
linguistics: One of the most nameworthy features is the polysynthetic character of the Ket verbal
complex.
Researchers have deemed different criteria obligatory for a language to be polysynthetic. One
of the more uncontroversial criteria is nominal incorporation. Ket, among a variety of other
languages across the globe, can incorporate nouns into verbal stems, producing constructions
such as the following:

da -tukun -bat -o -il -kit
3SG.F.SBJ -comb -1SG.OBJ -TH -PST -stroke
"She combed me."

Nominal incorporation is also an important part of Baker's "polysynthesis parameter" theory:
According to Baker, polysynthesis is characterised by the activity of a macroparameter
consisting of two parts, one of which is nominal incorporation. This theory, in turn, is based on
the assumption that nominal incorporation is nothing more than syntactic movement in the
sense of Chomsky's "government and binding" theory.
In my bachelor's thesis, I studied different types of nominal incorporation in Ket using the
narrow criteria set by Baker. The aim was to find out whether the polysynthesis parameter is
active in Ket, and consequently whether Ket is polysynthetic in Baker's sense.
The results show that only one type of nominal incorporation in Ket fulfils Baker's criteria:
Thus, Ket cannot be considered strictly polysynthetic according to Baker. However, the results
also show that there is still a lot of work to be done concerning lexicalisation processes: When
can instances of incorporation be assumed to be cemented in the lexicon of the speaker? And
which devices can be used to find this out?

Info

Day: 2023-10-28
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 1
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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