The Meaningful Bounds of Incorporation

Noun-incorporation structures (e.g. Mithun, 1984, Baker, 1988) have been investigated in detail by semanticists in recent years. Much of this work has centered around a notion of “semantic incorporation” (van Geenhoven, 1998), the semantic correlate of incorporation structures. A theory of semantic incorporation is necessary to account for a consistent constellation of semantic effects associated with noun-incorporation, including indefiniteness, lack of specificity, lack of scoping interactions with other logical operators, etc. In this paper I argue that this same constellation of effects is found in some (morphologically) unincorporated structures, and propose that a further notion, that of restrictedness, also appears to be a consistent, stable feature of all these structures, and bears further investigation.