Constraints on Quantificational Domains: Generic Plural des-Indefinites in French

Indefinite plural generic in French and quantification over groups. Later criticized in Mari and Martin Going Romance 2008

Constraints on Quantificational Domains: Generic Plural des-Indefinites in French

Indefinite plural generic in French and quantification over groups. Later criticized in Mari and Martin Going Romance 2008

Comparatives, Superlatives and Definiteness in Romance

Romance languages do not have superlative-dedicated morphemes (see most/-est in English) but instead express superlative meanings by using a comparative combined with a definite article. There are, however, interesting crosslinguistic differences that indicate that the role of “definiteness” for the superlative meaning of comparatives is different across Romance languages. Thus, French superlative adverbs and superlative postnominal adjectives are necessarily formed with (what looks like) a definite article (THE notates items that are morphologically identical to the definite article across languages) preceding the comparative morpheme plus (ER notates the comparative morpheme across languages, regardless of whether it is an affix or a free standing morpheme), whereas in the Italian corresponding examples THE is banned. According to Loccioni (2018) this crosslinguistic difference is not structural: in order to get superlative meanings Italian comparatives would be formed with a covert D(eterminer) corresponding to THE in French. I will propose instead that whereas French has a superlative-dedicated phrase of the form [THE ER], Italian has a “bare”, i.e., a THE-less ER that moreover lacks a than-argument, which gets a superlative meaning via raising to the Spec of [D°THE]

Types of Predicates and the Representation of Existential Readings

No abstract

Two types of most

The empirical puzzle to be solved is the contrast between partitive and non-partitive most (which respectively take of-DP and NP restrictors, respectively) wrt their compatibility with a collective predicate (or a collectively interpreted mixed predicate) in the nuclear scope. The proposal will rely on the 'null hypothesis' regarding the correspondence between syntactic categories and semantic type: DPs and NPs respectively denote entities and sets of entities. Our puzzle will be solved by explaining why set-restrictor quantifiers cannot denote relations between sets of plural entities whereas entity-restrictor quantifiers can denote relations between plural entities. It will also be argued that plural bare NPs in the restrictor of most can be kind-denoting (in addition to being set-denoting) in English. Throughout the paper the main generalizations will be strengthened or refined by taking into account the Romanian counterparts of the relevant dat. Keywords: collective quantification, mass quantification, bare mass NPs, bare plurals, kind-referenc

A Syntax-based Analysis of Predication

No abstract

The romanian supine and adjectival complementation. Tough constructions.

This paper provides an analysis of Romanian Tough constructions (i.e., structures like greu de citit "tough to read") as compared to French similar structures ("difficile à lire"). It accounts for agreement contrasts between the two languages: in Romanian there is a partial agreement, i.e. agreement of the copula, whereas in French the copula and the adjective both agree in the Tough construction. It is mainly argued that Romanian has two patterns of complementation, the one used in Tough constructions involves an adverbial predicate as Specifier of a vP "supine" projection.Cet article propose une analyse des structures de type Tough du roumain (à savoir structures comme greu de citit "difficile à lire") comparées aux structures similaires du français. L'analyse proposée rend compte des contrastes d'accord entre les deux langues: en roumain, il y a un accord partiel, seulement de la copule, tandis qu'en français la copule et l'adjectif Tough s'accordent. On propose essentiellement que le roumain dispose de deux modèles de complémentation, celui qui est utilisé dans les constructions Tough implique un prédicat adverbial qui est le Spécifieur d'une projection vP qui correspond à la structure non-finie enchâssée au supin

Relinquishing Control: What Romanian De Se Attitude Reports Teach Us About Immunity To Error Through Misidentification

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language

The Roles of First Language and Proficiency in L2 Processing of Spanish Clitics: Global Effects

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories—the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1 English (typologically different from Spanish) to L1 Romanian (typologically similar to Spanish) speakers from various L2 Spanish proficiency levels on an auditory sentence-processing task. We found main effects of proficiency, condition, and L1 and an interaction between proficiency and condition. Although we did not find an interaction between L1 and condition, the L1 Romanians showed an overall advantage that may be attributable to structure-specific experience in the L1, raising new questions about how crosslinguistic differences influence the processing strategies learners apply to their L2