Referring and quantifying without nominals: headless relative clauses across languages

Nominals can be used to refer to or quantify over individuals, while clauses convey propositional content, with the exception of set-denoting restrictive headed relative clauses. This well-attested crosslinguistic syntax/semantics mapping needs to be broadened. Recent crosslinguistic findings show that headless relative clauses—embedded argument or adjunct clauses with a missing constituent—are widely attested and are used to refer to or quantify over individuals, similar to nominals. The present work contributes to the investigation of the syntax/semantics interface of different varieties of headless relative clauses and begins to develop a much-needed close comparison with the syntax/semantics interface of nominals in order to establish which principles are at play in both families of constructions

Negative Concord in Russian. An Overview

In this article I will describe the general properties of Negative Concord in Russian, which is a strict Negative Concord language, where all negative indefinites must co-occur with sentential negation. However, there are several cases where the negation marker can be absent (like in fragment answers) or can appear in a non-standard position (like at the left of an embedded infinitival). I will take into consideration all these specific cases described by the literature on the negation system of Russian and analyse them according to current approaches to Negative Concord

A clausal analysis of free choice demo in Japanese

It is commonly assumed that in Japanese, an indeterminate pronoun followed by demo (indet-demo) corresponds to free choice any in English (FC any). Based on a number of semantic differences between the two, I argue that indet-demo is not a nominal free choice item, but a concealed unconditional adjunct, corroborating the claim made by Nakanishi and Hiraiwa (2019) and Hiraiwa and Nakanishi (2020, to appear). Based on Rawlins’s (2008, 2013) Hamblin analysis of unconditionals in English, I propose a compositional semantics of indet-demo that captures its semantics properties

On the status of NCIs : An experimental investigation on so-called Strict NC languages

Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UABPublished online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2023. First ViewThis paper investigates the status of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in three so-called Strict Negative Concord (NC) languages (namely, Greek, Romanian, and Russian). An experimental study was designed to gather evidence concerning the speakers' acceptability and interpretation of sequences with argumental NCIs in subject, object, and both positions when dhen/nu/ne were not present. Our results show that NCIs are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading to the whole sequence, thus arguing in support of the hypothesis that in NC structures the minimal semantic requirement to convey single negation is that one or more NCIs encoding a negative feature appear within a sentential domain. We argue that in these structures dhen/nu/ne are the instantiations of a negative feature [neg] disembodied from an indefinite negative NCI in order to obey a syntax-phonology interface constraint

Unconditionals and free choice unified

Rawlins (2013: 160) observes that both unconditionals and more classical free choice can be meta-characterized using orthogonality, but does not actually unify the two. One reason may be that in English, different expressions serve in these roles. By contrast, in Hungarian, AKÁR expressions serve as NPIs, FCIs, and unconditional adjuncts, but not as interrogatives or free relatives. This paper offers a unified account of the Hungarian data, extending Chierchia 2013 and Dayal 2013. The account produces the same unconditional meanings that Rawlins derives from an interrogative basis. This result highlights the fact that sets of alternatives arise from different morpho-syntactic sources and are utilized by the grammar in different ways, but the results may fully converge

Plurals in Kaiowá and the case for obligatory implicatures

El enfoque de este artículo es la marcación nominal opcional de número en Kaiowá (Tupí-Guaraní), expresada por la afijación, en posición post-nominal, de -kuera, un elemento que, según defendemos, es un morfema que pertenece al sistema central de concordancia de número de la lengua. Con base en el examen de datos linguísticos originales, demostramos la amplia ocurrencia de ese morfema en la lengua, que no está restringido a contextos definidos, siendo también frecuente en contextos genéricos indefinidos y con nombres que denotan especie. Además, notamos en un análisis preliminar que -kuera también puede funcionar como un morfema asociativo plural. Desde una perspectiva teórica formal, nuestro objetivo es extender a los hechos de Kaiowá una propuesta que se ocupa de la lectura “más de uno” / “al menos dos”, expresada por la marcación manifiesta del marcador de plural, como derivada de una implicatura (cf. SPECTOR 2007). Dicha propuesta requiere que se tomen en cuenta las alternativas (cf. FĂLĂUŞ 2013) que se activen semánticamente, pero que no se realicen morfológicamente. Así, aunque la función singular no está disponible en la morfología de la lengua, puede activarse en la semántica como alternativa a uma construcción en la que -kuera está presente. Argumentamos, por lo tanto, que ese morfema opcional funciona en la lengua como un “activador de alternativas” y, una vez que se activa una alternativa, la implicatura escalar se vuelve obligatoria (cf. CHIERCHIA 2006). Las dos lecturas en competencia, es decir, de plural vs. singular, constituyen el conjunto de alternativas escalares que se pueden formalizar como kueraALT = {lP: *P = P.P, lP: AT(P) = P.P

Two types of free choice universality across languages

The paper teases apart two types of interpretations displayed by so-called “universal” free choice (FC) determiners (e.g., French n’importe quel or Spanish cualquiera) depending on the kind of licensing environment they are placed in, which will be called parallel and serial universality respectively. Since serial universal readings are available to all FCIs cross-linguistically and the only possibility in some cases, they are taken to be the central semantic ingredient of free choice. Section 2 aims to establish a parallel between serial universality (particularly subtrigged sentences) and other constructions which involve semantically constrained pairs of events. The third section represent the co-variation of entity, event and world indices as an option that determiners have under certain (syntactic and semantic) conditions, and which FCIs have grammaticalized. The other ingredient which singles out serial universality from other event-related readings is the (non-optional) causal link between the events introduced by the relative clause and matrix events. The link between relative clause and matrix events is analyzed as a form of historical necessity, a relation between cause and effect, as understood within a metaphysical modal base