Incorporating a nominal into a phrasal predicate: The case of agent, goal, and multi-nominal pseudo-incorporation in Turkish

Incorporating a nominal into a phrasal predicate: The case of agent, goal, and multi-nominal pseudo-incorporation in Turkish

This paper discusses pseudo-incorporation in Turkish. We show that Turkish allows not only a theme but also an agent, a goal, or more than one nominal to be pseudo-incorporated in a single clause. The possibilities of non-theme and multi-nominal pseudo-incorporation in Turkish pose non-trivial problems for the previous analyses of pseudo-incorporation which presuppose that pseudo-incorporation occurs only between a lexical verb and its complement. We propose the correct generalization instead is that pseudo-incorporation may take place between a nominal and any predicate, either lexical or structural, that has not been saturated in the event domain with which the predicate is associated. Building on Chung and Ladusaw (2004), we formalize the generalization as an LF condition which constrains the non-saturating mode of semantic composition, predicate restriction, to apply in a certain structural environment. The LF condition not only accounts for agent, goal, and multi-nominal pseudo-incorporation in Turkish, but it also offers an explanation for the impossibility of agent pseudo-incorporation in certain environments in the language. The proposed analysis is also shown to properly capture the patterns of scrambling facts in the pseudo-incorporation constructions in Turkish.