Semantic Incorporation in English Singular Indefinites

In this paper, we introduce a class of exceptionally narrow-scoping singular indefinites in English (e.g., "Sam drove a car for several years before switching to a truck"), which pattern more closely with what have been termed "weak definites" in the literature (e.g., ; ) than with regular indefinites. While the existence of such exceptional "weak" indefinites has been previously anticipated by , the category is difficult to distinguish from simple narrow-scoped singular indefinites in most contexts. Here, we argue that there is one environment where weak singular indefinites can be distinctively identified: namely, when they appear with for-adverbials. We sketch a concrete implementation of a semantic incorporation-based account for such nominals, bringing them analytically in line with incorporation analyses of weak definites, building closely on the ideas in . We further briefly discuss how the proposed analysis adjudicates between two competing analyses for for-adverbials, one which assumes that for encodes a universal quantifier (e.g., ) and another which takes for to be non-quantificational (e.g., ), in favor of the latter view. We close by considering some remaining issues surrounding semantically incorporated DPs in English: specifically, how weak (in) definites relate to other nominals that receive covarying interpretations across contexts-such as bare plurals on the one hand (which we do not take to be semantically incorporated) and bare singulars on the other.