Specificity distinction

This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinction (connected to the weak/strong dichotomy), as well as, more recently, the question of whether the noun phrase is choice-functional or not (see Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999). In the discussion that follows I will attempt to make the following general points: (i) phenomena involving the behavior of noun phrases both within and across languages point to the need of establishing further distinctions that are too fine-grained to be caught in the net of these typologies; (ii) some of the relevant distinctions can be captured in terms of conditions on assignment functions; (iii) distribution and scopal peculiarities of noun phrases may result from constraints they impose on the way variables they introduce are to be assigned values. Section 2 reviews the typology of definite noun phrases introduced in Farkas 2000 and the way it provides support for the general points above. Section 3 examines some of the problems raised by recognizing the rich variety of 'indefinite' noun phrases found in natural language and by attempting to capture their distribution and interpretation. Common to the typologies discussed in the two sections is the issue of marking different types of variation in the interpretation of a noun phrase. In the light of this discussion, specificity turns out to be an epiphenomenon connected to a family of distinctions that are marked differently in different languages

Epistemic stance without epistemic modals: the case of the presumptive future

This paper deals with the non-temporal use of the future in Italian known as "epistemic" or "presumptive" (PF) in declaratives and interrogatives. We first distinguish PF from epistemic necessity and possibility, as well as from weak necessity modals, providing in the process the main empirical challenges PF raises. We then propose and justify a semantic account that treats PF as a special normality modal that involves a subjective likelihood component. Since in our account the prejacent (the proposition in the scope of the modal) is at issue, the use of PF triggers the implicature that the speaker is not in a position to appeal to what she knows in order to support her commitment to the prejacent. This, we claim, is the source of the intuition that PF is often used to offer a “guess” relative to the question under discussion (QUD)

Varieties of Indefinites

No abstract

How Clause-bounded is the Scope of Universals?

No abstract

Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French. </jats:p

How much syntax is there in Metalinguistic Negation?

This paper explores the syntax of unambiguous metalinguistic negation (MN) markers in European Portuguese (EP) with the main goal of demonstrating the syntactic import of MN. Taking the EP facts as a means to gain insight into the grammatical encoding of MN in natural language, the paper shows that unambiguous MN markers split into two types: peripheral and internal. This split is confirmed by their contrasting behavior with respect to different syntactic tests, e.g.: availability in isolation and nominal fragments; ability to take scope over negation and emphatic/contrastive high constituents; compatibility with VP Ellipsis. Peripheral MN markers respond positively to all the tests, whereas internal ones respond negatively. These facts are derived from a syntactic analysis where CP plays a central and unifying role. It is proposed that while the cross-linguistically pervasive peripheral MN markers directly merge into Spec,CP, the more unusual sentence-internal MN markers are rooted in the TP domain and reach Spec,CP by movement. The centrality of the CP field is motivated by elaborating on Farkas and Bruce’s (2010) model of polarity features. Under the hypothesis that besides the relative polarity features [same] and [reverse], there is a feature [objection] that singles out MN declaratives among responding assertions, this is taken to be the edge feature that drives unambiguous MN markers into the CP space.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio