Two types of incorporation in Ese Ejja (Takanan)

Vuillermet, Marine

doi:10.1075/slcs.163.06vui

In:Word Formation in South American Languages
Edited by Swintha Danielsen, Katja Hannss and Fernando Zúñiga
[Studies in Language Companion Series 163] 2014
► pp. 113–142

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Two types of incorporation in Ese Ejja (Takanan)

Marine Vuillermet | (University of California, Berkeley)*

Published online: 14 November 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.163.06vui

Ese Ejja is an Amazonian language that displays two types of noun incorporation. The first type is typical of the Amazonian area: it occurs within verb predicates, is restricted to inalienable nouns and has no influence on the valency of the verbal predicate. The second type is unusual in that it involves adjectival predicates and results in adjectives, semantically comparable to the English derived adjectives ‘blue-eyed’ or ‘red-haired’. However, the phenomenon is far more productive in Ese Ejja: adjectives do not only incorporate body-part terms but also possessed nouns, and even NPs and verbal roots. Their modifying function compensates for the quasi absence of attributive adjectives in the language. The analyses presented here are based on first-hand data collected in a Bolivian community. Keywords Ese Ejja; incorporation; adjectives; adjectival predicates; verbal compounding

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