Noun incorporation in Functional Discourse Grammar

This chapter discusses the treatment of noun incorporation within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar in relation to the place of interfaces within this grammatical theory. Interfaces are organized, on the one hand, in terms of implicational typological hierarchies, which constrain the possibilities for noun incorporation to occur in a language, depending on the cut-off points relevant for that language. On the other hand, there are restrictions on incorporation that are not predictable in terms of typological hierarchies, which are captured by basic settings within the interfaces. Starting from this division of labour between hierarchies and settings, we discuss the typology of noun incorporation in terms of the interfaces between pairs of levels within the grammar. Since noun incorporation is a morphosyntactic phenomenon, the Morphosyntactic Level is always involved in these pairs. Thus, the relevant interfaces are the interface between the Interpersonal Level and the Morphosyntactic Level,  the one between the Representational Level and the Morphosyntactic Level, and the one between the Morphosyntactic Level and the Phonological Level. after this pairwise typological discussion of constraints on noun-incorporation, we present one worked example of a full set of constraints within a single language, Kalaallisut.