Raised Possessors and Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic

• Main Author: van Geenhoven, V.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Hale; greenlandic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0001-EC5D-E; http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0001-EC5F-C

This paper addresses the question of whether noun incorporation is a syntactically base-generated or a syntactically derived construction. Focusing on so-called 'raised possessors' in West Greenlandic noun incorporating constructions and presenting some new data, I discuss some problems that arise if we use the derivational framework of Bittner and Hale (1996) to analyze them. I show that if we make the predication relations in noun incorporating constructions overt in their syntax and if we adopt a dynamic approach to semantics, a base-generated syntactic input enriched with a coindexation system is all that we need to arrive at an adequate semantic interpretation of these constructions.