This volume contains a collection of writings that focuses on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. The number of languages in which these phenomena are investigated is very large as well: Dutch, English, German, Inuktitut, Italian, Japanese, and Polish, to name a few. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

This volume contains writings focusing on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. These phenomena are investigated is many languages. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

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.