Noun incorporation and the progressive in German

This paper discusses the progressive construction in German and argues that this form constitutes a genuine instance of noun incorporation. Despite the fact that noun incorporation is not generally considered to be a property of Indo-European languages, we discuss several characteristics of the German progressive that bear a striking resemblance to noun incorporation constructions in languages better known for the phenomenon. Thus, we argue that the German progressive should be analyzed along the same lines as noun incorporation in other languages. In particular, we adopt the analysis for noun incorporation in Barrie (2006), which employs a Dynamic Antisymmetry framework. This paper, then, has two goals. The first is to describe the syntax and semantics of the German progressive, arguing that it is a type of noun incorporation. The second is to construct and analysis for noun incorporation in German similar to analyses for noun incorporation in other languages.