Telicity, Specificity, and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French

Ihsane, Tabea

doi:10.1163/9789004437500_008

Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article 2020

DOI: 10.1163/9789004437500_008

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Telicity, Specificity, and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French

Tabea Ihsane¹

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Cited by 4 publications

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“… 9. Specificity is understood in several ways in the literature: as scopal specificity (Krifka, 1989, 1992); as partitivity (Enç, 1991; Farkas & Brasoveanu, 2021); as referential specificity (Reinhart, 1997; Steedman, 2003, 2006; Winter, 1997); and as epistemic specificity (Ihsane, 2021; von Heusinger, 2002). …”

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Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and Russian

2023

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This article focuses on the choice of nominal forms in a language with articles (Catalan) in comparison to a language without articles (Russian). An experimental study (consisting of various naturalness judgment tasks) was run with speakers of these two languages which allowed to show that in bridging contexts native speakers’ preferences vary when reference is made to one single individual or to two disjoint referents. In the former case, Catalan speakers chose (in)definite NPs depending on their accessibility to contextual information that guarantees a unique interpretation (or the lack of it) for the entity referred to. Russian speakers chose bare nominals as a default form. When reference is made to two disjoint referents (as encoded by the presence of an additional altre/drugoj “other” NP), speakers prefer an optimal combination of two indefinite NPs (i.e., un NP followed by un altre NP in Catalan; odin “some/a” NP followed by drugoj NP in Russian). This study shows how speakers of the two languages manage to combine grammatical knowledge (related to the meaning of the definite and the indefinite articles and altre in Catalan; and the meaning of bare nominals, odin and drugoj in Russian) with world knowledge activation and accessibility to discourse information.

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Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and Russian

2023

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

Espinal¹,

Cyrino²

2021

J. Ling.

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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.

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Preverbal Subjects with a Partitive Article: A Comparison Between Aosta Valley Francoprovençal and French*

Ihsane

2021

Studia Linguistica

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In this paper, we focus on two constructions that allow preverbal subjects headed by a so‐called partitive article in French, that is, sentences with a stage‐level predicate and generic emphatic constructions. The aim is to explain why their counterparts were generally not accepted by speakers of Francoprovençal, an endangered and understudied Gallo‐Romance language, in a translation task carried out in fieldwork in the Aosta Valley in Italy (Ihsane 2018, Stark & Gerards 2020). To account for our results, we propose that preverbal subjects in the two languages have different statuses and develop the typology of languages postulated by Dobrovie‐Sorin & Laca (2003): we argue that there are more than two types of languages when it comes to the status of preverbal subjects and that Francoprovençal differs not only from French (Ihsane 2018), but also from languages like Spanish: it generally has topical subjects like Spanish but also allows some subjects that represent new information to occur preverbally. In contrast to French, however, this option is restricted to nominals that reach a certain degree of referential givenness (Gundel 2003).

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Telicity, Specificity, and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French

Cited by 4 publications

References 33 publications

Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and Russian

Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and Russian

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

Preverbal Subjects with a Partitive Article: A Comparison Between Aosta Valley Francoprovençal and French*

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