Raised Possessors and Noun Incorporation in West Greenlandic

This paper addresses the question of whethernoun incorporation is a syntactically base-generatedor a syntactically derived construction. Focusingon so-called ‘raised possessors’ in West Greenlandicnoun incorporating constructions and presentingsome new data, I discuss some problems thatarise if we use the derivationalframework of Bittner and Hale (1996) toanalyze them. I show that if we make thepredication relations in noun incorporating constructionsovert in their syntax and if we adopta dynamic approach to semantics, a base-generatedsyntactic input enriched with a coindexationsystem is all that we need to arrive at anadequate semantic interpretation of theseconstructions.