Indefinite DPs Research Articles

Brazilian Portuguese argument ellipsis

The present study puts forward a novel analysis of argument ellipsis (AE) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), according to which AE in BP takes place in a clitic doubling configuration, where the clitic is a phonologically null clitic and AE targets the clitic doubled DP. The clitic doubling analysis accounts for a number of the properties of AE in BP. Specifically, it accounts for the ability of AE to target object DPs; for the inability of AE to target subject DPs, including not only subjects of finite clauses but also subjects of small clauses and infinitival clauses; and for the inability of AE to target non-specific indefinite DPs and idiomatically construed DPs. The present study also reviews the influential anti-agreement theory of AE and argues that it does not offer a viable account of AE in BP, as it both undergenerates and overgenerates AE in BP.

«¡La de + N + que…!» The Feminine Definite Article in Spanish Exclamative Clauses

The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article la in structures such as ‘¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of the pattern is offered so as to show that the data under analysis are pseudopartitive constructions which display all the characteristics of primary and partial exclamatives. Building on research on nominal exclamatives, we conclude that these examples are not CPs but indefinite DPs with an exclamative flavor which contain a semi-relative clause introduced by que. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, we schematize a set of syntactic structures which capture the ‘chimeric’ and hybrid nature of the data, these being halfway between DPs and exclamative clauses. In order to do so, it will be necessary to split the DP into smaller projections (FocP, FinP), since la must move to Spec-FocP to be interpreted as an exclamative operator.

Indefinite DPs in the Gallo-Romance of Piedmont, in some Marginal Northern Italian Varieties and in Romansh

This article investigates indefinite DPs in some Romance varieties spoken in border contexts between linguistic groups. Specifically, we will consider Occitan and Franco-Provençal varieties of western Piedmont, the western Ligurian dialects, the Lombard-Alpine dialects, and Romansh, also in comparison with other North-Italian systems. The central issue is the nature of the construcs DE + article/Bare Noun of Italian varieties, where the preposition de/di (DE) ‘of’ does not introduce the usual possessive or partitive PPs, but DPs with indefinite reading. In negative contexts, such phrases mostly require the narrow scope interpretation. We argue that DE + bare noun constructs, as generally bare partitives, are based on the lexical properties of the preposition DE.

Referential noun phrases distribute differently in Turkish speakers with schizophrenia.

In all human languages, noun phrases (NPs) (e.g., 'a field', 'the woman with a book') are used to identify entities in discourse. Previous evidence has shown that the spontaneous speech of patients with schizophrenia (Sz) shows differences in the distribution of grammatically different types of NPs, which are in part specific to patients with formal thought disorder (FTD). Here we sought to provide the first evidence of related grammatical effects in a non-Indo-European language. Results from a picture description task in a sample of 16 Turkish speakers with FTD (+FTD), 15 without FTD (-FTD), and 27 controls revealed that relative to controls, people with Sz over-produced NPs that are 'bare' (in the sense of lacking any grammatical items such as the or a in English). The +FTD group generally showed stronger effects than -FTD, and used more pronouns and less NPs co-referring with previously mentioned NPs. In addition, the dynamic distribution of NP types over narrative time showed an effect of increased mean distance between definite NPs in -FTD relative to controls. In +FTD but no other group there was an unexpected random distribution of indefinite DPs. Incidence rates of referential anomalies increased from controls to the -FTD and +FTD groups. These findings further confirm that Sz is manifest through specific linguistic effects in the referential structure of meaning as mediated by grammar. They provide a linguistic baseline for neurocognitive models of FTD and help to define appropriate targets for the automatic extraction of linguistic features to classify psychotic speech.

From a movement verb to an epistemic discourse marker

Abstract Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.

Random Choice from Likelihood: The Case of Chuj (Mayan)

AbstractResearch on modality has recently broadened beyond the verbal domain, unearthing questions about the cross-categorial nature of modality ( Arregui et al. 2017), for instance: To what extent do DP and VP modals mirror each other? Chuj, an understudied Mayan language, provides an ideal vantage point to answer this question with respect to random choice modality. Random choice indefinites convey, roughly, that an agent made an indiscriminate choice. In Chuj, random choice indefinite DPs involve a morpheme (komon) that can also appear as a verbal modifier (Royer & Alonso-Ovalle 2019), inviting a comparison between categories. We argue that both in DPs and VPs, komon conveys information about the likelihood of the event described, but that the modal component of komon is nevertheless tied to its syntactic position. VP-komon conveys that the most expected worlds where the described event happens are no more expected than the most expected worlds where it does not. DP-komon conveys a similar modal component, but hardwires a comparison between the likelihood of the event described, which involves an individual in the extension of the NP, and that of alternative events determined by considering alternative individuals in the extension of that NP. The characterization of the modal component of komon contributes to the characterization of random choice modality and brings into question whether this type of modality should be taken to be a unified category, since none of the previous proposals on the nature of random choice modality tie it to the expression of likelihood.

The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender of Determiners in Danish Monolingual and Bilingual Children: An Experimental Study

This paper examines the acquisition of grammatical gender of indefinite and definite DPs in Danish. It investigates which grammatical contexts further acquisition and which slow it down, and whether distinguishing between monolinguals and bilinguals makes a difference. Danish has a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), fusing gender with definiteness in the DP. In order to answer our research questions, we tested monolingual and bilingual Danish-speaking children (n=72) from different age groups using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a Picture Description Task, and a Story Task. A generalized linear mixed effects regression analysis of the results showed that i) the children produced the Standard Danish determiner significantly more often with common than with neuter nouns; ii) the children produced significantly more Standard Danish gender marking in simple DPs than in complex DPs; iii) the children produced significantly more expressions with definite determiners realized as suffixes than with indefinite determiners expressed as prenominal articles in accordance with conventional norms; and iv) bilingual children produced significantly less Standard Danish gender marking than their monolingual peers, but ceiling effects in the monolingual group made it impossible to examine interactions between group and grammatical context.*

Four Different Structures for Locative Resultatives

Li (1990) notices that there is a definiteness effect in locative resultative sentences in Mandarin (“M”): with an indefinite object DP, such sentences are fine, while they are not, when the object is definite.1 It is illustrated in (1b) and (2b). Interestingly, as (1a) and (2a) show, the definiteness effect is not observed in Cantonese (“C”).

The contrastive topic requirement on specificational subjects

AbstractThis paper offers a discourse-pragmatic account of the constraint on indefinite DPs as subjects of specificational copular clauses (a doctor is Mary). Building on Mikkelsen's (2004) proposal that specificational subjects are topics, I argue that they must be contrastive topics whichproperlycontain F-marked constituents. I show that this can account for the absolute ban on simple indefinite subjects, and allow for more complex indefinites to be subjects. Finally, I discuss the syntactic analysis that would be predicted given my pragmatic analysis, and the puzzles that arise from it.

In favour of the low IP area in the Arabic clause structure

Empirical evidence is provided for the existence of a discourse-related area between TP and vP in Jordanian Arabic (JA), a finding which is in line with Belletti’s (2004, 2005) model of the low IP area in natural languages. A two million-word corpus of naturally occurring data from JA, supported by grammaticality judgements from 50 JA speakers, reveals that the subject in VSO clauses of JA is mostly either a definite DP or a modified, indefinite DP, implying that a certain informational value (i.e., a topic or a focus) is assigned to the post-verbal subject in such clauses. Another piece of evidence, among many others, that substantiates this line of analysis comes from the distributional properties of the subject in VSO clauses with respect to the past tense copula ka:n ‘was’ and high vP adverbials. The subject appears to the right of the former but to the left of the latter. We take this as a good indication that the subject in VSO clauses moves to a structural position higher than vP adverbials, yet lower than T0. In order to account for the reason why the subject does not raise to Spec,TP in VSO clauses in JA, we adopt the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2004, 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2007). Criterial positions, whose heads are endowed with a specific informational feature such as [TOP] or [FOC], are traps. The subject landing in Spec, Topic Phrase or Spec, Focus Phrase (of the low IP area) gets frozen in place, obtaining, as a result, the VSO word order on the surface.

NPE, gender and the countable/mass distinction

The main purpose of this paper is to present arguments for the existence of a certain relation between formal gender features and the semantic notions ‘count noun’ and ‘mass noun’. In particular, facts relating to how NP ellipsis operates in indefinite DPs in Dutch and Afrikaans are taken to provide evidence for the proposed relation.

On the DP dependence of collective interpretation with numerals

This paper argues that, given a simple [DP VP] sentence, the availability of a collective interpretation crucially depends on the syntactic and semantic properties of the subject DP, specifically the presence versus absence of a pluralizing function that makes the collective interpretation available. In support of my claim, I present Lebanese Arabic and Western Armenian examples in which an indefinite DP contains a cardinal numeral and there is no overt distributivity operator but the interpretation of the sentence is nevertheless obligatorily distributive, regardless of the predicate. I show that neither a distributivity operator within the DP nor one on the predicate can explain this strictly distributive interpretation. Instead, I argue that in order to allow a collective interpretation, an indefinite DP must denote a quantifier over pluralities, a condition that is not always met in numeral-containing indefinite DPs. While the claims in this paper are based primarily on observations from Lebanese Arabic and Western Armenian, because both are morphologically rich languages, the fact that this constraint is operative in these two unrelated languages, in addition to striking similarities to the Russian gender system, suggest that it is an inherent property of DPs crosslinguistically.

On extraction from definite DPs

AbstractThis paper discusses the pattern of extraction of genitives out of definite DPs in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), with consideration of the Specificity Effect (Fiengo and Higginbotham 1981), a constraint that in English, for instance, prevents extraction from definite/specific DPs, allowing extraction only for indefinite DPs. BP allows extraction from DPs headed by definite and indefinite articles, but blocks extraction from DPs headed by demonstratives. Spanish allows extractions from indefinite DPs and blocks extraction from DPs headed by demonstratives. In addition, it blocks extraction of possessors and agents from DPs headed by definite articles, but allows extraction from themes in this context. In order to theoretically support our proposal, we consider the analysis presented by Ticio (2003, 2006), along with Grohmann's (2000) notion of prolific domains and the restrictions on movement observed by Ticio for Spanish, but with suggested modifications. We suggest that the different patterns of extraction of genitives found in English, Spanish and BP are due to the position in which the article holds, and also due to the category that allows genitives in each of these languages.

Nominal ellipsis as definiteness and anaphoricity: The case of Romanian

The paper presents a unitary syntactic and interpretative account of nominal ellipsis in Romanian DPs. As a Discourse Grammar phenomenon, nominal ellipsis is a double trope, involving both anaphoricity and contrastivity. On the one hand, it presupposes the retrieval of a suitable discourse antecedent. Since the ellipsis site is anaphorically related to the antecedent, it will be syntactically definite. Definiteness valuation is thus obligatory in any DP which contains an ellipsis site, and it is this step which provides the unity of nominal ellipsis. On the other hand, ellipsis also involves contrastivity of the remnant with respect to the same antecedent, a feature which entails the existence of a Focus projection, filled by merger or movement to the left periphery.In light of this theory, we examine several cases of nominal ellipsis in Romanian, investigating definite and indefinite DPs in turn. After briefly presenting our theoretical assumptions on nominal ellipsis and on the syntax of the Romanian definite articles, we study definite DP ellipsis with a variety of remnants, and then turn to ellipsis with indefinite quantifier remnants (cardinals included). Finally, the indefinite quantifiers unul (one.the) and altul (other.the) are also examined. Special attention is paid to ellipsis with lexical remnants: adjectives and nominal arguments, both situations being very well represented in Romanian, in contrast with other languages.

Indefinite Determiners and the Pragmatics of Referential Anchoring

In this paper we propose a unified framework for the representation of different types of indefinite pronouns and determiners in terms of referential anchoring. Referential anchoring is a pragmatic operation that establishes a functional dependency between the referent of an indefinite DP and some other discourse item. As such, the idea of referential anchoring is not new (cf. Kratzer, 1998; von Heusinger, 2002; Kamp and Bende-Farkas, 2010, etc.), however there is some confusion in the discussion of referential anchoring regarding exceptional scope readings. We claim that referential anchoring is independent of scope, even though referentially anchored functional readings often entail exceptional scope readings. We make a transparent formal proposal for referential anchoring that draws on the idea of domain narrowing in the sense of Schwarzschild (2002). Finally, we present the advantage of our analysis by applying it to the Russian indefinite determiners kakoj-to, koe-kakoj and kakoj-nibud'.

A phase-based approach to the construct state

This paper presents a phase-based analysis of the derivation of the status constructus (or construct state). That analysis is built on two arguments. First, I contend that a construct state in Classical/Standard Arabic contains a phase the head of which is K. Second, I claim that the head noun is a full indefinite DP the functional projection of which is similar to regular definite DPs. I maintain that a process of repeated External Merge merging the genitive phrase with the head noun culminates in a KP. Because of a ban on the co-occurrence of two syntactic functional projections of the same type in the same Spell-Out domain, I argue that the head noun is moved via Internal Merge from the complement of the phase head K to the edge of the phase. Since K is a phase boundary, it provides protection for the head noun DP from the genitive phrase DP, allowing the phase domain to be spelled out. That the genitive phase DP must be assigned only a genitive case, while the head noun DP can be assigned any one of the three cases can be derived from Chomsky’s (1998, 1999, 2001) Phase Impenetrability Condition.

DP Ellipsis as Independent Phenomena from pro in pro-drop Languages

Previous studies proposed that there is no CP ellipsis in English (Kennedy and Merchant 2000) and Korean (Ahn and Cho 2009, 2010, cf. Park 2009). In particular, Ahn and Cho (2009, 2010) suggested that apparent CP ellipsis in Korean be in fact DP ellipsis (null realization of DPs in more neutral terms), which is subsumed to pro-drop in Korean. Specifically, Ahn and Cho (2010) make it clear that there is no genuine DP ellipsis in Korean and apparent DP ellipsis is explained with pro. However, close examination of other data reveals that this is not always the case; considering sentences with reflexives, NPIs, indefinite DPs and free choice DPs, we claim that Korean has both pro with no internal structure and DP ellipsis with an internal structure in the ellipsis site, which explain frequent zero realization of argument DPs in many constructions. We propose that the DP contained in the target clause undergoes partial deletion - the DP is stripped of phonological and semantic features only - when it is identical with the one in the antecedent clause. That is, the internal structure remains intact in the ellipsis site. As to the interpretation of the null argument, we propose that the ellipsis site is filled in with semantic features by overt nominals in the antecedent clause and obtains interpretation at LF (cf. Oku 1998, Saito 2007).

Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean “John does not own more than one dog”, but rather “John does not own a dog”. A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the ‘more than one’ meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert ‘more than one’, but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The ‘more than one’ meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy).

Non-existential indefinites and semantic incorporation of PP complements

No abstract.

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001: Selected Papers from 'Going Romance,' Amsterdam, 6-8 December 2001 (review)

Reviewed by: Romance languages and linguistic theory 2001: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Amsterdam, 6–8 December 2001 ed. by Joseph Quer, Jan Schroten, Mauro Scorretti, Petra Sleeman, and Els Verheugd Roberta D’Alessandro Romance languages and linguistic theory 2001: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Amsterdam, 6–8 December 2001. Ed. by Joseph Quer, Jan Schroten, Mauro Scorretti, Petra Sleeman, and Els Verheugd. (Current issues in linguistic theory 245.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp vi, 353. ISBN 1588114457. $132 (Hb). ‘Going Romance’ is a major European annual discussion forum for theoretical research on Romance languages. This book is a selection of the papers that were presented at Going Romance 15 in 2001. [End Page 217] Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s opening chapter, ‘Spanish de-clauses are not always in the right mood’, reconsiders Sabine Iatridou’s question about the interpretation of mood in conditionals. In ‘Mood and focus’, Claudia Borgonovo proposes an analysis of modal choice in Spanish in terms of negation and its focus. Ch. 3 by João Costa is dedicated to ‘Null vs overt Spec, TP in European Portuguese’. He puts forward the idea that there exist preverbal A-positions for subjects in null-subject languages. In the following paper, Viviane Déprez examines the ‘Determiner architecture and phrasal movement in French lexifier creoles’. Edward Göbbel’s paper, ‘On the relation between focus, prosody, and word order in Romanian’, examines information structure in this Romance language. In ‘Economy of structure’, Cecilia Goria presents an analysis of subject clitics based on Piedmontese. Ch. 7 is dedicated to Daniela Isaac’s analysis of ‘Identificational focus vs contrastive focus’ in Romanian. The complexity of the null object category is the topic of Mary Kato’s ‘Null objects and VP ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese’. In ‘From non-identity to plurality’, Brenda Laca and Liliane Tasmowski show the double nature of French différent, which behaves both as an adjective and as a determiner. Karen Lahousse’s ‘On the nonunitariness of NP subject inversion’ shows that French NP subject inversion in interrogatives and in temporal subordinates are two different mechanisms. ‘Past participle agreement with pronominal clitics and the auxiliary verbs in Italian and French’ is the topic of Paul Law’s contribution. In ‘Deficient pronouns and linguistic change in Portuguese and Spanish’, Ana Maria Martins examines clitics in Old Romance and their derivatives in Spanish and Portuguese. In ‘Nominalizations of French psychological verbs’, Judith Meinschaefer analyzes the syntactic and semantic contribution of argument structure to nominalization. Andrea Moro’s ‘Notes on vocative case’ shows the anomalous behavior of vocative case with respect to other cases. In ‘Mapping out the left periphery of the clause’, Sandra Paoli offers support to Luigi Rizzi’s intuition about the existence of a low C-head with modal content. The left periphery of the clause is also the topic of the paper that follows, by Dorian Roehrs and Marie Labelle: ‘The left periphery in child French’. In ‘Plural indefinite DPs as plural-polarity items’, Benjamin Spector offers an account for the interpretation of French DPs introduced by the partitive article des. The partitive determiner, this time in Italian, is also analyzed in the next paper, ‘On the status of the partitive determiner in Italian’, by Gianluca Storto. Finally, determiners in general are the topic of the last paper, by Lucia Tovena, ‘Determiners and weakly discretised domains’, where the notion of weakly discrete units is introduced in order to account for the distribution of singular determiners expressing constant functions. Roberta D’Alessandro University of Cambridge Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America