CSLI Publications logo
new books
catalog
series
knuth books
contact
for authors
order
search
CSLI Publications
Facebook CSLI Publications RSS feed
CSLI Publications Newsletter Signup Button
 
Semantic Incorporation and Indefinite Descriptions cover

Semantic Incorporation and Indefinite Descriptions

Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic

Veerle Van Geenhoven

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.

Veerle Van Greenhoven was a staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen at the time of this publication.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Abbreviations
  • 1 Introduction
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 The field of inquiry
    • 2 Seeking semantic counterparts
      • 2.1 Incorporated nouns and English bare plurals
      • 2.2 Modified incorporated nouns and German split topics
      • 2.3 Summary
    • 3 A common semantic denominator: Predicative indefinites
    • 4 On the discourse behaviour of predicaticative indefinites
    • 5 The syntactic visibility of semantically incorporated indefinites
    • 6 The way in which this book has been organized

  • 2 Aspects of Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 Some structural aspects
      • 1.1 Morphological incorporation
        • 1.1.1 Adjectives, numerals, wh-words, names and verbs
        • 1.1.2 Incorporation and adjacency
      • 1.2 External moddification
        • 1.2.1 Adjectives
        • 1.2.2 Numerals
        • 1.2.3 Wh-words
        • 1.2.4 Nouns
        • 1.2.5 Relative clauses
      • 1.3 Summary
    • 2 Semantic aspects of West Greenlandic noun incorporation
      • 2.1 Incorporating verbs
        • 2.1.1 Make and eat
        • 2.1.2 Sell, get and buy
        • 2.1.3 Have
        • 2.1.4 The existential construction
        • 2.1.5 Intensional affixes
        • 2.1.6 Copulate
        • 2.1.7 Summary
      • 2.2 Incorporated nouns and their “scope” behaviour
        • 2.2.1 Negation
        • 2.2.2 Distributivity
      • 2.3 Summary
    • 3 Discourse aspects of West Greenlandic noun incorporation
      • 3.1 Presuppositional
      • 3.2 Partitivity
        • 3.2.1 Overt and covert paritives
        • 3.2.2 Numerals
        • 3.2.3 Quantifiers
        • 3.2.4 Wh-modifiers
        • 3.2.5 Summary
      • 3.3 Anaphoric potential
        • 3.3.1 Incorporated antecedents
        • 3.3.2 Are words anaphoric islands?
        • 3.3.3 Questions
      • 3.4 Summary
    • 4 Chapter summary

  • 3 Setting the Semantic Scene
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 Indefinite descriptions aren't quantificational
      • 1.1 DRT-93: A representational discourse semmantic framework
        • 1.1.1 Intersential binding
        • 1.1.2 Negation
        • 1.1.3 Donkey pronouns
      • 1.2 Heim's (1982) syntactic treatment
      • 1.3 Are there different types of indefinites?
    • 2 The scope of indefinites: A syntactic proposal
      • 2.1 Diesing (1992)
      • 2.2 Why German split topics lack strong readings
      • 2.3 Problems for Diesing
        • 2.3.1 Are partitive NPs necessarily quantifiers?
        • 2.3.2 Why do bare plurals never raise?
      • 2.4 Summary
    • 3 The scope of indefinites: A semantic proposal
      • 3.1 Indefinites receive intermediate readings
      • 3.2 Why not a Heiman account?
      • 3.3 Abusch (1994)
      • 3.4 Loose ends for Abusch (1994)
      • 3.5 Reinhart (1997)
      • 3.6 Summary
    • 4 The scope of the English bare plural
      • 4.1 Carlson (1977)
      • 4.2 Objections against Carlson (1977)
        • 4.2.1 Are bare plurals ambiguous
        • 4.2.2 Objections against a lexicalized existential quantifier
      • 4.3 Summary and an open end
    • 5 Predicative and free variable indefinite descriptions
      • 5.1 Some features of the ideal theory of indefinite descriptions
      • 5.2 Converting these features into a theory of indefinites
    • 6 Chapter Summary

  • 4 Setting the Syntactic Scene
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 Two mainstream approaches
      • 1.1 A lexical approach
        • 1.1.1 Di Sciullo and Williams (1987): The qualifier theory
        • 1.1.2 Some problems for the qualifier theory
      • 1.2 A syntactic approach
        • 1.2.1 Baker (1988): Noun incorporation by head movement
        • 1.2.2 Some problems for the transformational approach
      • 1.3 Summary
    • 2 The excluded middle: Noun incorporation syntactically base generated
      • 2.1 Dowty's (1979) proposal
      • 2.2 The syntactic position of incorporated nouns
        • 2.2.1 De Hoop (1992): Weak and strong Case
        • 2.2.2 Incorporated nouns as constituents in a V-projection
      • 2.3 Semantic interpretation and the base generated approach
        • 2.3.1 De Hoop's semantic picture
        • 2.3.2 Some problems for de Hoop
        • 2.3.3 Weak Case NPs and incorporated nouns denote properties
      • 2.4 Summary
    • 3 The syntactic position of predicative indefinites in German
      • 3.1 Adjacency and the German bare plural in Object position
      • 3.2 Split topics in German
        • 3.2.1 Split topics as NP split
        • 3.2.2 Problems for NP split
        • 3.2.3 Split topics as V split
      • 3.3 Summary
    • 4 Chapter summary

  • 5 Semantic Incorporation
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 The semantic of predicative indefinites
      • 1.1 The proposal
      • 1.2 Semantic incorporation vs. Carlson (1977)
        • 1.2.1 Properties vs. kinds
        • 1.2.2 Dynamic vs. static
        • 1.2.3 Generic readings of bare plurals
      • 1.3 Logical Form and its interpretation
    • 2 West Greenlandic incorporated nouns are semanticall incorporated
      • 2.1 The simple case
      • 2.2 An incorporated wh-word
      • 2.3 When incorporated nouns are semantically incorporated
        • 2.3.1 Adjectives
        • 2.3.2 Intensional adjectives
        • 2.3.3 Numerals
        • 2.3.4 Wh-modifiers
        • 2.3.5 Relative clauses
      • 2.4 Summary
    • 3 The West Greenlandic affix -qar-
      • 3.1 The relational meaning of -qar-
        • 3.1.1 Relational TO HAVE
        • 3.1.2 Relational vs. possessive TO HAVE
        • 3.1.3 TO HAVE vs. TO HAVE AS
      • 3.2 The existential meaning of -qar-
      • 3.3 Summary
    • 4 “Scope” effects and other predicative indefinites
      • 4.1 Negation
      • 4.2 Predicative indefinites and distribution
      • 4.3 Split topicalization in German
      • 4.4 Predicative subjects
      • 4.5 Summary
    • 5 Intensional verbs
    • 6 Semantic incorporation vs. Bittner (1994)
      • 6.1 Bittner (1994)
      • 6.2 Some loose ends in Bittner's approach
        • 6.2.1 The head movement part of the proposal
        • 6.2.2 The predicate modifier part of the proposal
    • 7 The anaphoric potential of predicative indefinites
      • 7.1 Semantic incorporation in a discourse semantic framework
      • 7.2 Which words are anaphoric islands
      • 7.3 Summary
    • 8 Chapter summary

  • 6 Scope of Indefinites
    • 0 Introduction
    • 1 The trigger of the accommodation proposal
    • 2 Accommodation and presupposition projection
      • 2.1 Van der Sandt: Presupposition as anaphora
      • 2.2 The resolution of presuppositions
        • 2.2.1 Direct anaphoric linking
        • 2.2.2 Top-level accommodation
        • 2.2.3 Trapping
        • 2.2.4 Local accommodation
        • 2.2.5 Pragmatic ambiguity
        • 2.2.6 Bridging effects
      • 2.3 Summary
    • 3 Incorporating and accommodating indefinites
      • 3.1 Every man loves a woman
      • 3.2 Abusch's data revisited
        • 3.2.1 Predicting the preferences
        • 3.2.2 Presuppositions determine the scope of an indefinite
        • 3.2.3 Bridging effects
        • 3.2.4 Bare plurals
        • 3.2.5 Indefinites in sentence intial scope islands
        • 3.2.6 Summary
      • 3.3 What does it mean for an indefinite to accommodate?
      • 3.4 Summary
    • 4 Partitivity
      • 4.1 Overt partitivity: The Partitive Constraint revisited
        • 4.1.1 Barwise and Cooper's (1981) Partitive Constraint
        • 4.1.2 A novel interpretation of the Partitive Constraint
        • 4.1.3 The interpretation of indefinite partitives
      • 4.2 Covert partitivity
        • 4.2.1 Nominal expressions with a partitive interpretation
        • 4.2.2 Predicative indefinites lack a partitive interpretation
      • 2.3 Summary
    • 5 Chapter summary

  • 7 Summary and Open Ends
  • References

3/1/98

ISBN (Paperback): 1575861321 (9781575861326)
ISBN (Cloth): 157586133X (9781575861333)

Subject: Linguistics; Grammar--Syntax; Semantics

Add to Cart
View Cart

Check Out

Distributed by the
University of
Chicago Press

pubs @ csli.stanford.edu