In this talk, I present the semantic analysis of West Greenlandic noun incorporating configurations developed in van Geenhoven (1996). I defend the view that - like any other "narrow" indefinite - an incorporated noun and its external modifiers are interpreted as predicates. The latter are absorbed by a verb as the restrictions of this verb's internal argument whose existential interpretation is lexicalized as a part of the verb's meaning. I show how this process - called Semantic Incorporation - captures the inherent narrow scope of incorporated nouns as well as their lack of a partitive and of a definite reading.

From a cross-linguistic perspective, Semantic Incorporation sheds new light on the notion of "weak NP". Moreover, I show how this semantic process brings us to the source of Milsark's Definiteness Restriction.

References

• van Geenhoven, V. (1996) Semantic Incorporation and Indefinite Descriptions: Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic, Ph.D. Diss., Universität Tübingen.