Noun-incorporation in English as a valency-changing device Elizaveta Smirnova a, * , Svetlana Shustova b a National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia b Perm State National Research University, Russia Received 23 October 2016; received in revised form 11 April 2017; accepted 11 May 2017 Available online 25 May 2017 Abstract This paper explores changes of verb valency by means of noun-incorporation. We claim that noun-incorporation in English manifests itself in verbs formed by compression and backformation, such as to baby-sit, to head-hunt, to whistle-blow, and denominal verbs formed by transmutation, for example to doctor, to nest, to knife. Analysis of more than 6500 contexts with English incorporation complexes taken from corpora has shown that noun-incorporation in English leads to simple or complex change of valency. Semantically a sentence with noun-incorporation can be either complicated, due to extra connotations and metaphorical meanings of incorporation complexes, or simplified, due to reduction of semantic valency and morphosyntactic reduction. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Noun incorporation; Incorporation complex; Verb valency; Actant; Change of valency; Syntactic structure; Semantic structure 1. Introduction Noun-incorporation -- integration of a noun into a verb -- is a distinctive feature of polysynthetic languages, for example Chukot, Mohawk, Iroquois, Shoshonean, Pawnee, Takelma, etc. Complex words of the noun + verb type, however, are present in different groups of Indo-European languages, which are not polysynthetic, notably in English. Noun- incorporation in English has been studied previously (see, for instance, Hall, 1956; Rice and Prideaux, 1991; Feist, 2013) through examples of verbs formed by compression and backformation such as to baby-sit, to head-hunt, to whistle-blow. We believe, that noun-incorporation in English is not limited to compound verbs, but also manifests itself in denominal verbs formed by transmutation, for example to doctor, to nest, to knife. We call verbs of both the types, incorporation complexes, and assume that noun-incorporation is the phenomenon which has syntactic and semantic consequences due to its ability to change the valency of the affected verbs. To our knowledge, there are no works focusing on noun- incorporation in English as a valency-changing device. This paper intends to contribute to understanding the syntactic and semantic role of noun-incorporation in the English language. www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Lingua 194 (2017) 15--25 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: cmelizaveta@yandex.ru, esmirnova2@hse.ru (E. Smirnova). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2017.05.005 0024-3841/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.