Focus and the LF of NP quantification

Herburger, Elena

doi:10.3765/salt.v3i0.2749

Cited by 73 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…So, only is not conservative. One could argue that non-conservativity is a property that only shares with some uses of weak determiners discussed by Westerstahl (1985) and more recently Herburger (1993Herburger ( , 1997…”

Section: Option (Ii)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only

Fintel

1997

Journal of Semantics

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its 'prejacent'). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be analyzed as having existential quantificational force. But that is difficult to maintain, since the prejacent structures when encountered on their own are naturally read as having a lawlike flavor, which in many analyses is attributed to the semantics of implicit operators alleged to be present in them. In the end, an analysis is presented which attributes some very particular properties to these operators and thereby succeeds in providing the target sentences with intuitively adequate interpretations. These complex constructions can therefore be used as a probe into the nature of implicit quantification in natural language.

show abstract

Section: Option (Ii)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only

Fintel

1997

Journal of Semantics

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is a well known fact, and it has been explicitly stated on several occasions after Kuroda's paper, e.g. in Mejías-Bikandi 1993, Herburger 1994, Raposo and Uriagereka 1995, and Rosengren 1997 Thus, an utterance like (1b), containing an IL predicate, is always a categorical judgement: it is characterized by the partition of the clause in a topic and a comment, in conformity to the subject/predicate distinction of Aristotelian logic, with the indefinite NP a Masai as the logical subject of the predication -in fact, indefinite generic subjects are known to be licensed only in categorical judgements, as predication topics 5 .…”

Section: The Status Of the Il/sl Distinctionmentioning

confidence: 82%

A Relevance-Theoretic Account of the Property Predification Restriction

Leonetti¹

1998

Current Issues in Relevance Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…However, this is a controversial point: Kratzer (1995) upholds that individual-level predicates lack such an argument, because a sentence like 'Juan is afraid of spiders' is not actually an event, but a property of Juan. Otherwise, other authors, like Higginbotham (1985Higginbotham ( , 1987, Herburger (1993) or Uriagereka & Raposo (1995) argue that there are no purely individual-level predicates, but that such a label is assigned depending upon the syntactic operations that have an impact on the event argument and its scope. Although the details of such discussion will be retaken later, by now I would like to say that in this paper I will follow this second approach and support the uniform existence of an event argument for all predicates.…”

Section: Event Identification and Temporal Readingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A syntactic approach to the Spanish 'al + infinitive' construction

Rico

2016

Borealis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper seeks to study the way in which the interpretation is fixed in the Spanish AL + infinitive construction. The reading of these adjuncts can be temporal or causal. Some studies that have approached this issue previously (Rigau 1993; Alonso-Ovalle 2002) have attributed the interpretative disparity to purely semantic reasons, while others (Rigau 1995; Hernanz 1999; Martines 2000) have described the phenomenon without delving too deep in the syntactic details that influence the reading. The aim of this analysis is to approach the problem of the interpretation considering factors of syntactic order. I will claim that the reading is fixed depending basically on two factor: 1) the kind of topological relation that is established in each case: in temporal adjunction, the C head selects an IP as its ground; on the contrary, in the causal adjunction the ground is an XP, a projection between IP and CP that generates opacity with regard to the reading of the temporality; and 2) the retrospective orientation that the auxiliary haber generates.

show abstract

Focus and the LF of NP quantification

Abstract: No abstract.

Cited by 73 publications

References 5 publications

Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only

Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only

A Relevance-Theoretic Account of the Property Predification Restriction

A syntactic approach to the Spanish 'al + infinitive' construction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About