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The article is a commentary on a few general themes in the contributions for the Lingua Special Issue on Definiteness and Indefiniteness. Various empirical and methodological aspects of the research on the syntax/semantics interface within DPs are discussed, with particular focus on the problem of bare nouns, specificity and the possibility of a property denotation for arguments.
Singular predicative nominals in English generally require an indefinite article, while equivalent constructions in the Romance languages do not. We examine two sorts of predication constructions, primary predications and modificational predication, and show that English and Romance vary consistently in their need for overt Number. This difference is attributed to the Free Agr Parameter applied to...
This paper studies the ramifications of the flexible semantics in Winter (2001a) [Flexibility Principles in Boolean Semantics: Coordination, Plurality and Scope in Natural Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts] for the analysis of some of the facts in ''the core set'' for this special issue. Within this framework, it argues (i) for a general ''anti-economy'' principle in the application of...
In this paper, we regard Zimmermann's [Natural Language Semantics 1 (1993) 149] property analysis of verbs of absence as a special case of the independent ability of verbs to take property-type complements [Ladusaw, W.A. (1994). Proceedings of SALT IV. Ithaca: CLC Publications, p. 220]. By integrating into this analysis a Quinian decomposition of verbs of absence we can tease apart the distinction...
In this paper I focus on the relation between the definiteness status of a DP and the definiteness status of its subparts across languages. I show that contrary to what has been assumed in e.g., Longobardi (1996) possessive constructions across languages do not show a uniform behaviour with respect to (in)definiteness spread and thus, it is questionable whether a unified treatment of possessive patterns...
This paper compares the properties of bare nouns in a non-plural marking French Lexifier Creole to those in plural marking languages in order to better understand the role played by number, both semantic and morphological, in determining the meaning of bare nouns. A parameter is proposed that distinguishes languages according to whether or not the structure of their nominal expressions obligatorily...
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