ABSTRACT
The treatment of incorporated nouns and medials proposed in the previous chapter lends support to my syntactic analysis of Plains Cree verbal complexes (or the predicate portion thereof) in terms of stacked νP-structures. This chapter argues that these two incorporation phenomena are not isolated cases. To be added to the inventory of syntactic processes internal to the verbal complex are the “Generic Object Construction” (GOC) and the “Unspecified Subject Construction” (USC). These two constructions are exemplified by (1a) and (1b).
Both constructions are triggered by a specific suffix. The GOC suffix is -ikê in (1a). (1b) has one of the many variants of the USC suffix -ikawi. Notice that both suffixes appear to occupy a position that is otherwise occupied by the animate theme sign -ê in (1c). This, however, does not necessarily mean that the relevant two suffixes occupy one and the same position, the position that the animate theme sign occupies (i.e., ν2). As their names suggest, these processes affect different grammatical functions. GOC affects the object whereas USC affects the subject. In the syntax, this difference can be captured in terms of c-command and locality. Consider the following schematic phrase structure:
