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Article published In: Functions of Language
Vol. 32:2 (2025) ► pp.224–278

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Noun incorporation in English

A typological perspective

ORCiD logo with link | University of Liège
ORCiD logo with link | University of Liège
Published online: 18 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.24048.lou
Abstract
This paper gives a unified account of noun incorporation in Present-Day English from a constructional and typological perspective. We first investigate how productive it really is, given the contrasting statements in the literature. Using data from the WordBanks Online corpus, we show that the process is remarkably productive: it is highly extensible, with high type frequency and a broad variety of possible semantic relations between the incorporated noun and its incorporating verb. It is also a regular process, with noun incorporated verbs found in all possible forms, including finite ones. Second, since noun incorporation is productive in English, we investigate how it fits in existing typologies of noun incorporation, more specifically the one proposed by Mithun, Marianne. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language 60(4). 847–894. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. We show that types I (lexical compounding) and II (case manipulation) are uncompromisingly available in English, while type III (discourse manipulation) is restricted; type IV (classificatory incorporation) is attested even if not resulting in a fully-fledged nominal classification system. We argue that these differences relate to the typological profile of English, viz. as an analytic language with overtly expressed arguments, contrary to the polysynthetic languages studied by Mithun. The availability of types II-IV incidentally further substantiates the productivity of the process, since these types typically develop later than type I. More generally, this study contributes to our understanding of noun incorporation and its characteristics in more analytic languages, which are understudied in this respect, and provides one of the few detailed, corpus-based studies of noun incorporation in an Indo-European language, where it is overall rare.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
  • 3.Productivity of noun incorporation in English
    • 3.1Extensibility: Lexical expansion of the N-V pattern
      • 3.1.1Type and token frequencies
      • 3.1.2Semantic relations between IN and V
      • 3.1.3‘Special’ cases: Incorporation of proper nouns, plural nouns and nominal complexes
    • 3.2Regularity: Variety in forms
    • 3.3Interim conclusion
  • 4.Typology of noun incorporation in English
    • 4.1Mithun’s (1984) classification of noun incorporation
    • 4.2Mithun’s types I, II and IV in English
      • 4.2.1Type I
      • 4.2.2Type II
      • 4.2.3Type IV
    • 4.3What about type III?
    • 4.4Interim conclusion
  • 5.Concluding discussion
  • Data availability statement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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