Incorporation (linguistics)

Incorporation (linguistics)

Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function.

Incorporation is central to many polysynthetic languages such as those found in North America, Siberia and northern Australia, but polysynthesis does not necessarily imply incorporation. Neither does the presence of incorporation in a language imply that that language is polysynthetic.