Bare Noun Phrases Research Articles

A three-way distinction in definiteness: sortal, individual, and functional concepts in Réyoné

Abstract This article offers a case study of a definiteness split in a language in which three different types of nominal expressions are available for definite descriptions. The article contributes ample empirical data and comprises a close investigation of the patterns found in Reunion Creole (Réyoné), the language under study. Réyoné displays one kind of contrast also found in other languages which is frequently analyzed in terms of semantic versus pragmatic definiteness (following Löbner) or uniqueness versus familiarity (following Schwarz). What sets Réyoné apart from other languages though, is that it features a determiner that is dedicated to functional concepts. The language thereby distinguishes individual from functional concepts: the former type (the sun; the News) is exclusively expressed by bare noun phrases, while functional concepts – definite descriptions with functional head nouns (prefect of y; head of y), including a subtype of bridging reference, as well as compositionally created functional relations such as superlatives – are realized by lo-marked noun phrases. These facts offer strong support for Löbner’s theory. The article also discusses demonstrative descriptions, which have already been reported to play a role in certain definiteness splits, and which are obligatory with sortal concepts in Réyoné. It is argued that demonstratives are pragmatic definites.

Verbs psicològics transitius amb subjecte experimentador

The article describes the behaviour of emotional psychological verbs in Catalan such as lamentar ‘to regret’ or odiar ‘to hate’, which participate in transitive sentences with an experiencer subject (SubjExp verbs). Like other sentences with emotional verbs, they have two characteristics: constraint of postverbal bare noun phrases and construction with a subordinate clause in subjunctive. These are features that differentiate them from other non-emotive psychological predicates and that determine which meanings of the verb behave as SubjExp. Within the verbal group, there are specific behaviours of predicates that admit an accusative object of personal reference (SubjExp(+pers) verbs such as odiar ‘to hate’) and those that do not admit them (SubjExp(–pers) verbs such as lamentar ‘to regret’). Some verbs, such as admirar ‘to admire’ or menysprear ‘to despise’, may have another lexical meaning that allows them to express a change of state in the experiencer, such as a patient, and to be part of a group of emotional psychological verbs other than SubjExp.

Nomes simples sujeitos pré-verbais

Research on Bare Noun Phrases (BNs) is focused on English and have Carlson (1977) as its origin: the readings (generic or existential) of these nouns depend on the type of predicate they occur with (Kind-, Individual- or Stage-level).Most authors use the Determiner Phrase, including number information, as the key to the readings BNs may get. The D position contains non-checked features which, in European Portuguese (EP), are not checked by Noun-raising to D.According to Oliveira & Cunha (2003), Kind nouns in EP crucially depend on the presence of a definite determiner. Thus, BNs are not Kind Nouns and can never be assigned generic readings.Pre-verbal Subject BNs, though, may occur in EP with Kind- and Individual-level predicates and characterizing sentences – as categorical judgements – getting a non-existential reading by being marked topics. But they also occur, getting an existential reading, in sentences where they are discourse sub-topics in descriptive contexts, like ‘scripts’, in Fillmore’s (1985) sense.The survival of BNs in the pre-verbal position depends on the combination with both Aktionsart values and types of predicates with which they occur. The [+habitual] feature determines the possibility of movement of the subject BN to a pre-verbal (Spec, TP or, as I suggest, TopP) position. This position is non-argumental and thus escapes the government or asymmetric c-command by a verb or a preposition constraint, allowing for a non-existential reading of the noun. The non-checked features in the empty D position are legitimated by a feature in TopP, namely the ‘aboutness’ feature (Reinhart 1981). They are a part of ‘common ground management’ (Bianchi & Frascarelli 2010). They are ‘aboutness topics’ or ‘contrast topics’ (Büring 1999), and they occur in root-sentences or epistemic subordinates.The availability of a non-existential reading of pre-verbal Subject BNs of activity predicates also depends on a parallelism effect: BNs as Objects facilitate a non-existential reading of a Subject BN when occurring with a [+habitual] feature predicate. The topicalization construction, as described by Duarte (1987, 1996), corresponds to the syntactic behavior of BNs in pre-verbal position getting a non-existential reading.In descriptive contexts, BNs occur as sub-topics of a ‘script’ (Fillmore 1985), i.e., they are information resulting from a stereotype situation. According to Abbot et al. (1985), ‘scripts’ are structured in a hierarchy. Lower levels are in a partonomy relation with higher levels. Thus, an explicit or implicit situation allows for the inclusion of low-level explicit information which may not be inferred. They get existential readings and are reconstructed in a post-verbal position. The sentences are thetic judgements. The pre-verbal position makes them prominent and their position in Spec, TP is allowed by an accumulation of events or states or by a logical connection in which there is no lexical connector. The paratactic connection follows from the meaning hierarchic created by the ‘script’. In these cases, when BNs co-occur with the Indicative Present, it does not have a [+gnomic]/ [+habitual] feature.

The Necessity of Minimal Representation of Genericity in a Newly Developed Language, Unish

The current study compares generic representations in different languages including English and Korean. It reviews important universal concepts of genericity denotation in languages and compares how genericity is realized in different languages. By comparing different genericity representations in different languages, the current study predicts possible acquisition difficulties. It also suggests difficulties of acquiring English article systems are also caused by the complex nature of article uses. Particularly, using a large corpus data (ICNALE), the current study reveals how L1 Korean L2 English learners use articles when they denote generic terms in their essays. Ample uses of bare Noun Phrase (NP) forms tentatively suggest that (i) probably uses of ‘articles’ are not necessarily the most efficient way of expressing genericity, and (ii) it can be marked by other grammatical functions, which are more simple and regular. Therefore, the current research argues that NP systems should be simplified and minimally represented in a newly developed language, which by nature will be learners’ extra language. In the current research, generic NPs in Unish language is introduced and it suggests that bare noun forms in Unish can denote genericity in a very regular and economical manner. Therefore, it may be easier for leaners to acquire because the configuration process is minimized in the Unish.

Uniqueness in languages with and without articles: Catalan vs Russian

The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), and its relation to the presence/absence of the article in the overt morphosyntax. The empirical study, presented in this paper, confirmed the theoretical prediction that in Catalan the presence of a definite article conveys uniqueness of the referent, while an indefinite article suggests nonuniqueness. In the absence of articles (in Russian), bare nominals are compatible with both a uniqueness and a non-uniqueness interpretation. The reading of a bare noun phrase is inferred pragmatically, depending on contextual factors and the background knowledge of the interlocutors.

The impact of animacy and speech rhythm on the word order of conjuncts in German preschoolers and adults

In this study, we investigated the impact of two constraints on the linear order of constituents in German preschool children’s and adults’ speech production: a rhythmic (*LAPSE, militating against sequences of unstressed syllables) and a semantic one (ANIM, requiring animate referents to be named before inanimate ones). Participants were asked to produce coordinated bare noun phrases in response to picture stimuli (e.g., Delfin und Planet, ‘dolphin and planet’) without any predefined word order. Overall, children and adults preferably produced animate items before inanimate ones, confirming findings of Prat-Sala, Shillcock, and Sorace (2000). In the group of preschoolers, the strength of the animacy effect correlated positively with age. Furthermore, the order of the conjuncts was affected by the rhythmic constraint, such that disrhythmic sequences, i.e., stress lapses, were avoided. In both groups, the latter result was significant when the two stimulus pictures did not vary with respect to animacy. In sum, our findings suggest a stronger influence of animacy compared to rhythmic well-formedness on conjunct ordering for German speaking children and adults, in line with findings by McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993) who investigated English speaking adults.

A description of bare noun phrases in Reunion Creole

Abstract This paper discusses the general distribution and interpretation of bare noun phrases (BNPs) in Reunion Creole (RC). To set the required background for this description, it also discusses the count-mass distinction and offers an insight into the determiner system since elements such as prenominal lo and postnominal -la have received rather divergent designations and analyses in the literature. Observations rely on oral data and felicity judgments. We show that RC BNPs can occupy the same positions as noun phrases (NPs) modified by a determiner and that they can be left-dislocated, clefted and topicalized. We provide evidence that, except for some specific contexts, monosyllabic BNPs are not licensed and that the form lo is mandatory to build a grammatical NP out of nouns formed by a unique light syllable.1 We also demonstrate that, in these cases, lo is actually a semantically empty element. BNPs are number-neutral; we argue that existential BNPs are pseudo-incorporated in some cases but that they always have weak reference. BNPs can receive generic and kind readings, as well as an existential and a certain definite interpretation: they are weak definites, i.e. they are semantically, never pragmatically definite (following Löbner 1985, 1998, 2011, 2015).

Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

Are Lions Green?: Child L2 Learners’ Interpretation of English Generics and Definite Determiners

The aim of this small-scale study (22 participants) was to analyze how L1-Spanish L2-English children interpret English noun phrases (NPs) by taking into consideration two variables: children’s age and amount of input. These two variables were studied in relation to children’s developmental tendencies and language transfer. Children begin with an innate predisposition for the generic interpretation, which leads them to incorrectly interpret some specific NPs. In contrast, transfer from the L1 explains the incorrect mapping between NP and interpretation in adult L2 speakers. We examined 22 L1-Spanish L2-English children and a control group of L1-English children on their interpretation of English NPs through an online task. Results revealed that L2 children’s interpretations significantly differ from the interpretations of the control group. We propose that like L1 children, child L2 learners will have to overcome their natural predisposition to interpret NPs as generic. However, child L2 learners must also overcome transfer effects from their L1. Additionally, results seem to suggest that the amount of input plays a role in learners’ interpretations. We propose that children who receive similar amounts of input in their two languages become aware of the differences faster, particularly in the forms where there is no overlapping between the languages (i.e., bare NPs).

Rigid and Flexible Quantification in Plural Predicate Logic

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as some apples or a quantity of milk, differ from bare noun phrases like apples or milk in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal for-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial for-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier all.

Definite descriptions and the alleged east–west variation in judgments about reference

Machery et al. (2004) presented data suggesting the existence of cross-cultural variation in judgments about the reference of proper names. In this paper, we examine a previously overlooked confound in the subsequent studies that attempt to replicate the results of Machery et al. (2004) using East Asian languages. Machery et al. (2010, 2015) and Sytsma et al. (2015) claim that they have successfully replicated the original finding with probes written in Chinese and Japanese, respectively. These studies, however, crucially rely on uses of articleless, ‘bare noun phrases’ in Chinese and Japanese, which according to the linguistic literature are known to be multiply ambiguous. We argue that it becomes questionable whether the extant studies using East Asian languages revealed genuine cross-cultural variation when the probes are reevaluated based on a proper linguistic understanding of Chinese and Japanese bare noun phrases and English definite descriptions. We also present two experiments on native Japanese speakers that controlled the use of ambiguous bare noun phrases, the results of which suggest that the judgments of Japanese speakers concerning the reference of proper names may not diverge from those of English speakers.

Unpacking the variable context of quotatives

AbstractThe present study analyzes the use of quotatives in Spanish among twenty-four Spanish-English bilinguals from Southern Arizona and assesses the possible influence of English contact in their use.Cameron (1998)defines the envelope of variation of quotatives in Spanish as verbs of direct report, bare-noun phrases, and null quotatives. This study identifies a fourth strategy of quotative discourse markers. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the linguistic conditioning of these four strategies of direct quotation according to content of the quote and grammatical person points to the fact that quotative discourse markers appear to be conditioned differently than the other three strategies, but contact with English does not play a decisive role in their use. These results contribute to our knowledge of Spanish in the United States and variation in quotative systems by expanding onCameron’s (1998)study to explore the quotative system of the Spanish of the U.S. Southwest and adding an analysis of quotative discourse markers.

Reasoning about definiteness in a language without articles

Most theories of implicature make reference to a notion of alternatives. Interlocutors reason about what the speaker could have said. In this paper, I investigate the structure of these alternatives. In particular, I ask how these alternative utterances are constrained by the interlocutors' grammar. I argue that in order to derive certain implicatures, alternative utterances must be analyzed like actual utterances, as fully compositional structures appropriately generated by the grammar. The data supporting this position come from implicatures generated by indefinite bare noun phrases in Tagalog. I show that Tagalog indefinites give rise to non-uniqueness implicatures via competition with definites, as in English. However, unlike English, definite and indefinite interpretations of Tagalog NPs are not signalled by dedicated articles, but by verbal affixes. Therefore, in order to generate the observed implicatures, pragmatic competition must take into consideration the NP's broader syntactic context. Supporting the view that implicature calculation is sensitive to the morphosyntactic structure of alternative utterances, I show that in cases where the alternative is not grammatically well-formed, the implicature does not arise. These data provide evidence that only grammatically well-formed structures are able to enter into pragmatic competition.

Learning English bare singulars: Data in the L2 classroom

Contrasted with the more typical English bare noun forms of mass and proper nouns, bare singular count nouns comprise a problematic set for many descriptive grammars and thus for many second language learners. Although article usage is one of the trickiest areas of English as a Second Language (ESL) to master, bare noun phrases, and bare singulars in particular, are less emphasized in the English language classroom, where much of the focus is placed on learning to produce articles, not learning to exclude them. To investigate L2 sensitivity to bare singular forms, the distribution of bare and articulated NPs in corpus data is contrasted, nouns appearing most often without articles are tracked, and a survey of L2 grammaticality judgments by adult learners is gathered. Lastly, the combined results of the corpus and survey data are integrated into a lesson on the syntax and pragmatics of bare singular count nouns that is designed for the ESL classroom.

Interpreting Bare Nouns: Type-Shifting vs. Silent Heads

Bare noun phrases in article-less languages such as Japanese have a variety of interpretations. There are two competing approaches to the semantics of bare noun phrases: one is to appeal to type-shifting to derive various interpretations, and the other is to introduce more structure, i.e., silent determiners. I present an argument against the latter silent-head approach based on the behaviors of phonologically null arguments in Japanese. The silent-head approach has difficulties in explaining the semantics of null arguments, whatever syntactic analysis of null arguments turns out to be correct. The type-shifting approach to bare noun phrases, by contrast, easily accounts for the semantics of null arguments.

NULTA IMENIČKA SINTAGMA U ELIPTIČNIM STRUKTURAMA ITALIJANSKOG JEZIKA

Osnovnu temu ovog istraživačkog rada čini nulta imenička sintagma, koja se u italijanskom jeziku često pojavljuje u redukovanim sintaksičkim strukturama. Do izostavljanja sintaksički redundantnih jedinica iskaza dolazi iz nekoliko razloga, među kojima su za ovaj predmet istra živanja najbitniji ekonomija jezika, emfaza i stil. Pojava nulte imeničke sintagme u italijanskom jeziku vrlo često koincidira sa elipsom, te smo posebnu pažnju obratili na vrstu elipse u kojoj se pojavljuje nulta imenička sintagma (retorička i gramatička), ali i na vrstu gla gola koji se izostavlja u eliptičnoj strukturi. Ove redukovane strukture istražili smo na površinskom i dubinskom nivou iskaza, oslanjajući se na principe generativne gramatike i sa vremenog strukturalnog metoda. Rezultati istraživanja predstavljaju sintaksičko-semantičke uslove i jezičke kontekste koji dovode do pojave SNØ u elipsi.

Learning exponents of number on first exposure to an L2

Number lends itself to the study of how input interacts with transferred first language (L1) knowledge to facilitate or impede second language (L2) learning. We present data from adult English speakers exposed for the first time to Indonesian, a language that expresses number through bare noun phrases, reduplication and numeral + classifier constructions. Participants were trained on each construction and subsequently tested on both familiar expressions and novel ones. Learners acquired all three constructions. We discuss our results in terms of current theories of second language acquisition.

Characterizing the Bilingual Disadvantage in Noun Phrase Production

Up to now, evidence on bilingual disadvantages in language production comes from tasks requiring single word retrieval. The present study aimed to assess whether there is a bilingual disadvantage in multiword utterances, and to determine the extent to which such effect is present in onset latencies, articulatory durations, or both. To do so, we tested two groups of Spanish speakers (monolinguals and early highly proficient bilinguals using their first and dominant language) each in two different production tasks: bare noun and noun phrase production. Onset latencies were longer for bilinguals relative to monolinguals in both production tasks. Regarding articulatory durations, we observed a clear bilingual disadvantage in noun phrase production and a strong tendency in bare noun production. These findings generalize the bilingual disadvantage in speech production to various performance measures (onset latency and articulatory duration of production) and beyond single words.

Interpreting Bare Nouns: Type-Shifting vs. Silent Heads

Bare noun phrases in article-less languages such as Japanese have a variety of interpretations. There are two competing approaches to the semantics of bare noun phrases: one is to appeal to type-shifting to derive various interpretations, and the other is to introduce more structure, i.e., silent determiners. I present an argument against the latter silent-head approach based on the behaviors of phonologically null arguments in Japanese. The silent-head approach has difficulties in explaining the semantics of null arguments, whatever syntactic analysis of null arguments turns out to be correct. The type-shifting approach to bare noun phrases, by contrast, easily accounts for the semantics of null arguments.

The Syntax ofhou後 in Temporal Phrases in Han Period Chinese

AbstractIn this paper a unified account of the syntax of temporal phrases with the locative morphemehou後 followed by a NPtemp, a measure NP, is presented. Identical to bare noun phrase temporal adverbials,hou-phrases predominantly occur in sentence-initial/topic position and establish the temporal frame for the situation the predicate refers to; by default they refer to a point of time. According to the analysis presented,houexplicitly serves to relate one situation to a previous situation in the narrative; the NPtempmeasures the interval, the period of time, elapsed since the previous situation took place, and accordingly the NPtempis analysed as an appositional measure phrase. This analysis of the NPtempyields an analysis ofhou後 as an adverbially employed noun which syntactically retains its nominal characteristics and thus permits the addition of an apposition. Additionally, the nominal analysis ofhouis the only one which accounts for all syntactic variants of thehou-phrase in Han period Chinese.