noun incorporation in Nahuatl

[Frances Karttunen]

As I understand it, incorporated object nouns are generic, while
unincorporated ones are specific.

For instance,

nicchihua cactli I am making a specific shoe/shoes'

vs.

nicacchihua 'I am engaged in shoemaking"


On Dec 7, 2004, at 3:57 PM, David Eddyshaw wrote:

> Quite often in general linguistic discussions of polysynthesis I've
> come across the assertion that incorporated objects in Nahuatl can be
> referential (ie. are active in discourse, can be picked up by pronouns
> etc). For the life of me I can't see this; as far as I can see in fact,
> for a noun stem to be incorporated into a verb as object it actually
> must _not_ refer to any particular entity. Am I just wrong about this?
> Is it something in which Classical Nahuatl differs from some modern
> dialects?
>
> David Eddyshaw
>