Productive compounding in Baure (Arawakan)

The Baure language (Arawakan) can be described as polysynthetic, agglutinating, head-marking, and classifying. Verbs are the most complex parts of speech, with various levels of derivational and inflectional morphology. Baure nouns are involved in fewer morphological processes, such as number and locative case marking. However, productive compounding leads to additional morphological complexity of nouns.Our broad understanding of ‘compounding’ includes bound lexical morphemes, such as classifiers and locative stems. We argue that we are actually dealing with one structure in Baure, based on a right head that is modified by any component to its left, be it that the elements in the compounds are bound or free forms. The construction is structurally also similar to noun or classifier incorporation to verbs.