Recent research on the Copy Theory of Movement has suggested that the realization of movement chains may be regulated by well-formedness conditions governing complex word formation, such as the Stray Affix Filter (e.g., Nunes 2004; Landau 2006). This paper extends this idea to account for certain underdocumented patterns of noun incorporation in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). In contrast to most prior characterizations of incorporation in the Inuit language, I demonstrate that, at least in Inuktitut, incorporated nominals are syntactically active DPs: they are able to participate in case and agreement alternations and undergo phrasal movement. These findings, in turn, motivate an analysis in which incorporation in at least Inuktitut takes place solely to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements of certain verbs that are lexically specified as affixal (cf. Sadock 1985, 1991). The observation that incorporated nouns invariably surface within the verb complex even when extracted follows straightforwardly from the aforementioned interaction between chain resolution and the Stray Affix Filter.
