Semantic Incorporation and Indefinite Descriptions

This volume presents 'semantic incorporation' as an analysis accounting for many striking similarities between the semantic properties of incorporated nouns in West Greenlandic and bare plurals and split noun phrases in West Germanic language. This analysis uniformly treats these nominal expressions as predicative indefinites. At the outset, van Geenhoven explores the empirical basis for why semantic incorporation is needed. The inability of existing semantic theories of indefinites as well as current structural approaches to noun incorporation to account for the data observed is then explored, and, finally, the work presents semantic incorporation as a subtheory of indefinites. This volume will be of interest to semanticists, lexicalists, syntacticians and linguists.