This innovative analysis of noun incorporation and related linguistic phenomena does more than just give readers an insightful exploration of its subject. The author re-evaluates—and forges links between—two influential theories of phrase structure: Chomsky’s Bare Phrase Structure and Richard Kayne’s Antisymmetry. The text details how the two linguistic paradigms interact to cause differing patterns of noun incorporation across world languages. With a solid empirical foundation in its close reading of Northern Iroquoian languages especially, Barrie argues that noun incorporation needs no special mechanism, but results from a symmetry-breaking operation.