Pseudo-Incorporated Antecedents and Anaphora in Persian: The Influence of Stereotypical Knowledge

Abstract

There are different theories about the nature of pseudo-incorporated nouns (PINs), which feature a non-specific, number-neutral interpretation. For a proper analysis it is crucial to take their anaphoric potential into account. This paper investigates if and how PINs introduce discourse referents, with evidence from Persian, and which theory matches this behavior best. We report on experiments in which the stereotypical enrichment of the number-neutral interpretation was systematically varied with two types of biases — towards a singular or a plural interpretation — and in the neutral case, when such a bias is lacking. The results of the experiments are compatible with Krifka & Modarresi (2016), which considers PIN objects as dependent singular definites (similar to weak definites) within existential closure over an event variable.

Weak definite nominals

“…The discourse referential nature of WDNs has been claimed to be defective by Scholten and Aguilar‐Guevara (2010), Oggiani (2011) and Cooley (2013). In contrast, Modarresi and Krifka (2021a, 2021b) have shown empirical evidence in favor of the opposite claim.…”

“…More recent works have followed Carlson (2006)’s and Schwarz (2014)’s proposals, (for example, Dayal (2015), Dayal and Sağ (2019), Williams (2019) and Modarresi and Krifka (2021a, 2021b). In contrast to the pseudo‐incorporation view, other authors have called for an approach in which WDNs are genuine complements of their predicates, but refer to abstract objects.…”

“…The literature on WDNs has studied the phenomenon mostly in American English. However, WDNs have been documented in several other Indo‐European languages (Donazzan, 2014, for Italian; De Swart, 2015, for English; Modarresi & Krifka, 2021a, 2021b, for Persian; Gerards, 2022, for different varieties of Latin American Spanish; Sag, 2022, for Turkish, among others). In this review we will tackle this phenomenon empirically by using data of Rioplatense Spanish (RPS), an underrepresented variety of Spanish (spoken in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and their surroundings) that, for the purpose of this review, display two relevant properties.…”