Two Types of Object Incorporation in Uzbek

This paper investigates object incorporation in Uzbek (Southeastern Turkic/Karluk), a phenomenon whereby a nominal in the object position integrates into the verb, yielding a closely associated verbal unit much different from a parallel non-incorporated direct object construction. The question of whether Turkic languages employ incorporation and if they do, whether it is true incorporation (TI) or pseudo-incorporation (PI) is subject to an on-going debate. The current study contributes to the discussion by (a) analyzing Uzbek data, under-investigated within the generative framework, and (b) arguing that the same language may exhibit both PI and TI. The focus of the present work is on Uzbek ‘bare nominals’, i.e. nominals which do not contain determiners, overt quantifiers and inflectional morphology, such as number- and case- marking. Specifically, we argue that, most typically, bare nominals in the object position are pseudo-incorporated (1a) and as complements of light verbs (1b), they may be treated as truly incorporated.