Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

Semantic incorporation has been proposed to occur independently of syntactic incorporation
in a number of languages, mostly to account for the semantic behaviour of
‘bare’ nominals. For example, Van Geenhoven proposes that English bare plurals (45)
are semantically, but not syntactically, incorporated.
(45) I read books
Heyd and Mathieu provide a number of arguments for the claim that de phrases are
semantically incorporated. Their most important one comes from the inability of de
phrases to take scope higher than the position in which they appear. We saw in the
previous section that de phrases in QAD constructions are scopally inert; however, as
Heyd and Mathieu show, this is a property of de phrases that is independent of QAD.
For example, de phrases may never take scope over negation.
(46) J’ai pas lu de lives
I have not read of books
‘I did not read any books’ not ‘There were books that I did not read’
Similarly, de phrases may only be interpreted de dicto in Split-Combien sentences with
intensional verbs.
(47) Combien as-tu cherché de livres?
how many have-you sought of books
‘How many books did you look for?’
An incorporation analysis of de phrases is suggested in the works of Heyd (2003) for
de phrases that appear under negation and Mathieu (2002; 2004) for de phrases that
appear in the Split-Combien construction.
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