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date: 25 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Mapudungun is the primary member of the small Araucanian family – its greater genetic affiliation is uncertain – and is spoken by some 300,000 Mapuche people in central Chile and adjoining areas of Argentina. Compounding is frequent and productive in Mapudungun, and constitutes an important part of the language's overall polysynthetic quality. Different types of compounds can be distinguished, with some cross-cutting similarities. Perhaps the most interesting theoretical issues raised by compounding in Mapudungun stem from the fact that different ordering principles apply to different kinds of compounds. These principles are at least partly independent of what categories are involved in compounding. This chapter discusses the three most prominent kinds of compounding in Mapudungun – V + N, N + N, and V + V – then briefly considers other sorts of compounds in the language, including those that contain an adjectival root.

Keywords: Mapuche compounds, compounding, verbs, nouns

Mark C. Baker

Mark Baker is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1985, and has also taught at McGill University. He is the author of numerous technical articles and four research monographs: Incorporation (1988), The Polysynthesis Parameter (1996), The Lexical Categories (2003), and The Syntax of Agreement and Concord (2008). He has also written one book for a more general audience, The Atoms of Language (2001). His primary research interest is the syntax and morphology of less-studied languages, especially Native American languages and African languages.

Carlos A. Fasola

Carlos A. Fasola is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Rutgers University. His research interests are in argument structure, phrase structure, the semantics of functional heads, and American Indian languages.

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