The interpretation of plural mass nouns in Greek

Tsiakmakis, Evripidis; Borràs-Comes, Joan; Espinal, M. Teresa

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.05.017

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Dominican Spanish ello, for example has already been argued to convey speaker-related meaning (Hinzelin & Kaiser 2007;Greco et al 2017, a.o.). Similarly, the plural marking on Greek mass nouns has been found to correlate with the speaker's dislike towards the situation of utterance (Tsiakmakis et al 2021b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…( 15)) 16 See Cyrino and Espinal (2020) for a pluralizer modifying feature adjoined to N (or the categorial n) in English and in marked cases in Romance. 17 See Tsiakmakis et al (2021b) for an experimental study on the interpretation of pluralized mass nouns by native Greek speakers. This study provides linguistic evidence for an analysis of Greek plural mass nouns as expressive variants of their singular counterparts, by means of which the speaker commits to holding a negative emotive stance (i.e., dislike) towards the situation communicated by the utterance containing the plural mass noun.…”

Section: Semantic Expletivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Expletiveness in grammar and beyond

Tsiakmakis

Espinal

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper sets out to find the defining characteristics of so-called expletive categories and the consequences the existence of such categories has for Universal Grammar. Looking into different instantiations of expletive subjects and impersonal pronouns, definite articles, negative markers and plural markers in various natural languages, we reach the following generalizations: (i) expletive categories are deficient functional elements interpreted as introducing an identity function at the level of semantic representation, (ii) they can be divided into syntactic expletives, that occur to satisfy some syntactic relationship with another item in the clause, and semantic expletives, that stand in a semantic dependency with some c-commanding category, and (iii) expletive categories tend to develop additional meaning components that are computed beyond core grammar, at the level where speech act-related information is encoded. Our discussion reveals that all categories that have been traditionally considered as expletive in the linguistic literature are interpretable in grammar or beyond and, thus, do not violate Chomsky’s Full Interpretation Principle. We conclude that there are no expletive elements in natural languages and that expletiveness is not a grammatically relevant concept.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Semantic Expletivesmentioning

confidence: 99%