West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with.

中文翻译：

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多合成的两条途径

West Circassian 在语言和名词领域都显示出突出的多合成形态，并且两个句法类别都受到相同的形态排序约束。我认为，尽管有这些相似之处，西切尔克斯语中的名词和动词词形实际上是通过两种不同的构词过程构建的：而动词词根和任何伴随的功能形态由于形成一个单一的复杂句法中心而被发音为一个单一的语音词由于语法到韵律映射的规则，通过头部置换，名义头部及其修饰语被发音为单个单词。这种分工解释了为什么只有名词而不是动词在语言中表现出生产性名词合并：West Circassian 名词合并是韵律的，而不是句法的。这两种构词途径存在的证据来自于在动词名词化中观察到的对语素排序的系统性破坏。就更广泛的理论影响而言，拟议的分析提供了对形成多合成语言的因素的深入了解：虽然将多合成形态简化为简单的头部置换或只是将复杂的句法结构映射到没有任何头部的单个语音词的结果很诱人位移，西切尔克斯的数据表明，这些机制都不能被免除。