The Semantics of Case and Incorporation

This talk deals with the semantic status of non case-marked direct objects in Hindi. Such nominals are argued to be NP complements of ordinary transitive verbs. They are marked by having number neutral interpretations, by their resistance to pronominal discourse anaphora and by their propensity for referring to proto-typical events. In this talk I attempt to give a formal account of the last property, and in doing that, provide a new way of addressing the first two properties. Briefly, modality is built into the semantics of incorporation and aspectual information given a greater role in accounting for number neutrality and discourse accessibility.