This special volume presents a series of papers which all deal with the semantics of nominal expressions.
It has long been clear that the relatively simple picture of the relationship between syntactic category and semantic type on which all noun phrases denote generalized quantifiers, while perhaps feasible to maintain, is an idealization that does little to advance our understanding of the great richness and variety in the semantics of nominals that is attested in the world’s languages. In the last thirty years, this picture has grown progressively more complex along at least two dimensions that we would like to emphasize here.
It should be evident that the study of the semantics of nominals continues to offer many interesting avenues to explore. There is still much work to be done to clarify what exactly incorporation consists in –to what extent it is syntactically and semantically homogeneous cross-linguistically, and what its status is within a model of grammar which pursues simplicity and economy (Van Valin 1999). Work on incorporation and related phenomena has forced rethinking about how semantic composition is achieved and how broad the semantic typology of nominals might be; it also has consequences for our understanding of argument structure. Another rich area involves the sortal domain of noun semantics –some of the papers in this volume present perhaps unexpected proposals for the sortal category of noun phrases, with interesting extensions in the empirical coverage of semantic theory. Yet a third area pointed to by the contributions to this volume involve the discourse-pragmatic aspects of meaning that are conventionalized in the interpretations of noun phrases –perhaps the area in greatest need of development.

The main purpose of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics (CatJL) is to publish research papers concerned with the structure of particular languages from the wider perspective of a general theory of the human language.
Grown out of its predecessor, the Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics (CatWPL), this publication is made possible thanks to the cooperation of the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica of the UAB with the Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana.
This journal publishes monographic volumes (under commision) that feature research papers devoted to the formal study of languages.

The contributions in this volume collectively address several persistent challenges in the analysis of partitivity, such as (i) the semantic underspecification of partitive markers, which are not always transparently associated with the part–whole relation; (ii) the connection between partitive markers and indefiniteness and negation; (iii) the diachronic development of partitive markers and their relation to other categories, such as determiners and prepositions; and (iv) the syntactic structure of binominal constructions. Overall, we hope that these contributions advance our understanding of the many empirical and theoretical problems that partitivity poses for linguistic theory.