Incorporation as a Grammaticalization Pathway: Chukchi Incorporating Morphology in Areal Perspective

Abstract

In addition to canonical noun incorporation, Chukchi exhibits other kinds of incorporating morphology that are consistent with polysynthesis but have seldom been considered as part of a unified morphological phenomenon. This paper examines different patterns of incorporation in Chukchi across time and asks: what are the useful loci of variation for typological comparison, how do these distinct patterns emerge diachronically, and how do these features spread in contact? I consider the existing documentation of Chukchi from the early 20th century through the present, including modern data which exhibits some novel patterns. Consistent with previous investigations of Chukchi in contact (Bogoras, 1922; de Reuse, 1994; Pupynina and Aralova, 2021), I demonstrate that the effects Chukchi has had on other languages is greater than the reverse: many morphological phenomena in Chukchi are internally-motivated and emerge from speakers’ reliance on incorporation as a discourse strategy. Specifically, I provide a unified analysis of incorporation across the nominal and verbal domains, valency-changing derivational morphology, and inflectional morphology built on the morpheme -in(e), which I argue functions as a generic underspecified noun in the language. In the realm of language contact, I propose a cline to model patterns in the borrowing of derivational phenomena like incorporation, and present shared patterns in Chukchi, Central Siberian Yupik, and Even which support this cline. Finally, I examine data from Chukchi as it is spoken today and argue that the historical linguistic ecology of northeastern Siberia has made it possible for incorporation to remain highly productive even with significant shift to Russian.