Noun Incorporation: Syntactic or Morphological Approach

Noun Incorporation is one of the productive processes of word formation in Languages especially in Persian. This Process is based on incorporating a nominal head -Nº- (mainly internal argument) with a lexically verbal head -Vº- and its output is an intransitive incorporate verb. Satisfied with its argument structure, This output itself can act as a base stem for other derivations. Usually, there are two approaches in accounting for Noun Incorporation. One approach is based on a syntactic movement of a noun toward a verb and then their incorporation as Baker (1988) suggests. The other approach is morphological one which is on the basis of the selection of a noun stem and a verb stem from the lexicon, and then their compounding gives an intransitive incorporate verb, In this article, it has been clarified that morphological approach can account for this process better than syntactic one, because it can increase the degree of productivity and generality in word formation.