French Locatum verbs and incorporation

This paper examines various aspects of the French Oblique Locatum Construction in the perspective of incorporation accounts of the verbal root on one side and of the Locatum on the other. We first argue that, while the verbal root may restrict the oblique Locatum, a fact compatible with an incorporation analysis of that root into V from an argument-like position, it also often describes the mode of occupation of the Location, in which case such an analysis doesn’t seem to be appropriate. Second, we argue against a semantic incorporation analysis of the oblique Locatum in its nonspecific reading. Among other things, we show that a strongly quantified DP realizing the oblique Locatum always has narrowest scope (the frozen scope effect), just like the parallel weakly quantified oblique complement, a fact which indicates that the generalized narrow scope of the oblique Locatum is independent of possible incorporation.