Lexical affixes, incorporation, and conflation: the case of Coeur d'Alene

This paper presents a formal account oflexical affixesin Coeur d’Alene (Salish/Idaho USA). Lexical Affixes comprise a closed class of bound morphemes which productively add semantic content to the predicate in the Salishan family of languages, among others. It is argued that Lexical Affixes are arguments that incorporate syntactically ( Baker 1988 ) along the lines of Harley (2004) who argues for aConflation( Hale & Keyser 2002 ) analysis of compounding in English. Further, it is argued that a Conflation account of incorporation is preferable to that proposed by Baker, Aranovich, and Golluscio (2004) , in which a great number of theoretical mechanisms are proposed. The Conflation analysis proposed here accounts for the same phenomena with far fewer theoretical mechanisms.