Incorporation in Danish: Implications for interfaces

Syntactic noun incorporation (SNI) in Danish is a phenomenon that has reflexes in phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In contrast with morphological noun incorporation, which involves compounding of an N stem and a V stem to yield a larger, derived V stem (Mithun, 1984, 847), SNI does not involve any overt word order perturbation or overt morphology, but is rather expressed prosodically. However, SNI shares essential semantic and pragmatic characteristics of morphological noun incorporation (in particular, Mithun’s (1984) type I incorporation). Although there is a large body of descriptive work on SNI (see Rischel and Basbøll (1995) and references cited there), there have been few attempts to give a formal analysis of the phenomenon (a notable exception is Hentze (1996)). As an information-theoretic, sign-based framework, HPSG is especially well-suited for a formal treatment of SNI that simultaneously captures generalizations in all four areas as well as interactions between them. Building on work by Abeillé and Godard (2000), Bird and Klein (1994), and Meurers (1995, 1999), we propose a lexical account of SNI that introduces non-trivial extensions to HPSG phonology. However, we follow the descriptive literature on the Danish phenomenon in using the term ‘syntactic noun incorporation’.