Head Movement and Noun Incorporation

Head movement (HM), once a mainstay of generative syntax, has undergone a tumultuous series of overhauls over the years (Baker 2009, Boeckx and Stjepanović 2001, Chomsky 2001, Fanselow 2003, Mahajan 2003, Matushansky 2006, Roberts 2010). The problems with HM have been discussed in the literature just cited, and we do not comment further on them here. Rather, we wish to address the issue of HM and noun incorporation (NI) in light of Roberts’s (2010) recent reworking of HM. In a nutshell, we show that the mechanism for HM adopted by Roberts (who uses NI to support his agreement proposal), while well-suited for capturing other properties Roberts discusses such as clitics in Romance and Slavic languages, fails to capture various properties of NI in several languages—notably Fox and Ojibwe (Algonquian) and various Northern Iroquoian languages (Mohawk, Onondaga, and Oneida), though we discuss other...