Determiners and (Un)certainty

Canonical quantification describes the configuration of canonical quantificational sentences, (1a), while non-canonical quantification occurs when Q and its restriction are not adjacent anymore, (1b) 1 . Floating Quantifiers (FQs) are typical instances of non-canonical quantification: they involve movement of the noun restriction past the lexical Q (Kayne 1975, Sportiche 1988,) 2 . FQ structures depend on the association of a Q and an associate DP: toutes  DP les filles and chacune  DP des filles 3 . Tous les N "all the N" and chacun des N "each of the N" can overtly reflect (1a) and (1b): (2a)/(3a) exemplify (1a); and (2b)/(3b) illustrate (1b). FQs and non-FQs are truth conditionally equivalent : toutes

Les phrases aux propositions consécutives constituent un problème complexe parce que son statut syntaxique et son interprétation sémantique envisage beaucoup de problèmes qui donnent lieu à des analyses très différentes. Notre but, dans cet article, est donc celui de proposer une analyse sémantique des phrases subordonnées consécutives finies en Portugais Européen fondée sur des critères de quantification.

The Noun Phrase in Romance and Germanic, 2011

Universal quantifiers such as all select a DP as their complement and can be "floated" or "stranded" by that DP, and in certain Germanic languages they can also co-occur with an interrogative DP. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether interrogative and non-interrogative DPs that co-occur with a universal quantifier in the Germanic languages have the same relationship to that quantifier and have gone through the same selection process. I begin with evidence from German that universal quantifiers can in fact select and be stranded by interrogative as well as non-interrogative DPs, but I ultimately argue, going back to an analysis in Giusti (1990b), that a universal quantifier co-occurring with an interrogative is base-generated to the right of that interrogative, not to its left. I also propose that the formation of interrogative expressions involving universal quantifiers may take place in the syntax or in the lexicon, depending on the language.

This paper presents a functional account of directives in spontaneous conversations in Spanish. More specifically, we address the use of imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with a directive meaning in interactions among equals. We start our analysis from Searle's (1969) Speech Act Theory. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood function in terms of the range of speech acts and degree of prototypicality within the category of directives. In order to do so, we describe the functional range of both constructions and the syntactic differences among them. It is argued that que-clauses are displaced directives, expressing atypical directivity. We also posit a functional division of labour between prototypical imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood. The study is based on the analysis of 57 conversations among adolescents from Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (COLA corpus). COMP PRON fall-PRS.IND.3SG

Language, 2013

This dissertation presents arguments in favour of an explicit Logical Form representation of components responsible for direct referentiality and domain restriction in definites, with a focus on Austro-Bavarian German, Standard Swedish, and Standard Canadian English. It provides a semantico-pragmatic analysis of the ban on wh-subextraction out of DPs with the “strong” articles in Austro-Bavarian and demonstratives in English which as- sumes their direct referentiality. The ungrammaticality of question formation is proposed to result from the pathological uninformativeness of its possible answers. The ban on wh- subextraction thus emerges as a new testing tool for direct referentiality. I further propose an analysis of the cases where strong articles and demonstratives do not behave directly referentially. Assuming structural decomposition of strong articles and demonstratives into a determiner head and a relational head, I propose that directly referential interpretation results from a silent individual pronoun occupying the specifier of the relational head, whereas covarying interpretations arise as a result of either a restrictive relative clause occupying this position, or else a relational noun functioning as the relational component itself. I proceed to extend this approach to account for the distribution of strong and weak definite articles in DPs with restrictive relative clauses. In the second part I analyze the pattern of the free-standing article omission in Swedish. I identify the omission with the use of a covert restrictor-less definite article, which accounts for why it is easily available with context-sensitive modifiers whose semantics has to make reference to a domain restrictor, but is limited to the cases of “global uniqueness” with context-insensitive ones. Thus Swedish, I propose, illustrates the case of a “rudimentary” article which, if the only one available, would make the problem of incomplete descriptions unsurmountable. This conclusion relies on, and thus provides evidence for, the unavailability of either domain restriction at the NP-level or implicit global restriction of the domain of individuals as a means of modelling the behaviour of Swedish definites.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982

A. Rouveret (ed.), Resumptive pronouns at the interfaces, 319-342. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 2011

Osaka Literary Review, 1979