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A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity in Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2021

M. TERESA ESPINAL
Affiliation:
Departament de Filologia Catalana/Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193-Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain Teresa.Espinal@uab.cat
SONIA CYRINO
Affiliation:
Deparmento de Lingüística, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Rua Sérgio Buarque de Holanda 571, Universidade Estadual de Campinas – University of Campinas, Campinas, SP – 13083-859, Brazil cyrino@unicamp.br

Abstract

In this paper we present an original approach to analyze the compositionality of indefinite expressions in Romance by investigating the relevance of their syntactic distribution in relation to their meaning. This approach has the advantage of allowing us to explore the question of how syntactic structure can determine the meaning of different forms of indefiniteness. To that end, we postulate a common derivation for bare plurals, bare mass and de phrases, whereby an abstract operator de is adjoined to definite determiners and shifts entities into property-type expressions. Quantificational specificity is proposed to be derived from a syntactic structure in which weak quantifiers select for indefinite de-phrases, no matter whether de is overt at Spell-Out or not; these quantifiers turn properties into generalized quantifiers. The anti-specificity meaning of some indefinites is derived by adjoining in the syntactic structure an abstract operator alg that encodes the speaker’s epistemic state of ignorance to a quantifier encoded for specificity, and it turns a generalized quantifier into a modified generalized quantifier. The paper also brings some general predictions on how indefiniteness is expressed in Romance, as it provides extensive support from five Romance languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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