Dr Brett Baker (Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne) studies Australian indigenous languages. In the Australian language Wubuy (aka Nunggubuyu), as in other Gunwinyguan languages, we find that nouns and some other kinds of constituents (quantifiers) can occur inside the word that hosts the main verb root, along with the morphology of agreement and tense. Various tests show that these incorporated nouns must be accessible to syntax (for instance, they can be externally modified, and coordinated with other nouns). On the other hand, there are well-known reasons for doubting that the process is fully syntactic. I propose an analysis of incorporation in Wubuy within a constructionist model of the lexicon (e.g. Jackendoff 2002, Booij 2010), wherein we can capture both the rule-governed and more idiosyncratic aspects of this phenomenon. Copyright 2012 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.