Some earlier treatments of the semantics of the prenominal genitive assume two syntactic types for genitive NPs like the girl's, one which combines with relational nouns like sister, and another that combines with non-relational nouns like car. In the former case the genitive relation is provided by the relational head noun, in the latter the source of the relation is taken to be provided by the utterance context. Our analysis uniformly assumes only one syntactic type for genitive NPs, viz., one that forces a genitive NP to combine only with relational nouns. In cases with inherently non-relational head nouns, such as the girl's car, we hypothesize that the genitive NP coerces a shift of the meaning of the head noun so that it becomes relational. To determine the sort of meaning shift which is carried out, we appeal to the qualia structure of the lexical entry for the head noun. A consequence of this analysis is an extension of the area of lexically determined interpretations and a corresponding reduction of the context-determined, pragmatic area. * This work has benefited tremendously from our intense discussions over the past several years with Barbara Partee and Vladimir Borschev. We are deeply grateful for all their help, criticism, and encouragement. Thanks are due also to Ash Asudeh, Line Hove Mikkelsen,

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The system of temporal connectives in Scandinavian exhibits an interesting variation in that Danish, like e.g. German, is a two-'when' language, i.e. it has two temporal connectives that have divided between them the semantic area covered in English by the single connective when. One of the two Danish connectives (da) is restricted to past episodic clauses, while the other one (når) may be used in past and present habitual clauses and in future clauses. Swedish, on the other hand, like e.g. English, is a one-'when' language: it has only one temporal connective corresponding to the two Danish ones, whereas Norwegian presents an intermediate situation, possibly a stage in the development from a two-'when' to a one-'when' system. This paper proposes a semantic analysis of the two 'when's in Danish: On the one hand, the semantics of da-clauses is similar to the semantics of definite DPs in that a da-clause presupposes that, in the current discourse situation, there is one and only one eventuality corresponding to the description it conveys. This makes it possible for a da-clause to have a reference-setting function with respect to its superordinate clause. On the other hand, når-clauses are similar to indefinite DPs in that they contribute propositions with an unbound eventuality argument, and therefore they yield descriptions of eventualities that never get referentially bound, but always occur in the scope of a non-existential quantifier. This restricts the use of når-clauses to habitual sentences and future sentences. This analysis involves the elaboration of a novel and more adequate formal semantic description of habitual sentences.

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