Bare and indefinite NPs in predicative position in French

Verbum, 2007

relate to bare nouns in European Portuguese (EP) in the same position and contexts. In what concerns the distribution of bare nouns (BN) in subject preverbal position without modifiers, a contrast between Germanic and Romance languages has been noticed: plural count nouns and mass nouns are grammatical in English, but not in French and they are quite restricted in Italian, Spanish and EP. Based on the criteria established by Dowty (1979) for distinguishing states from events and on the distinction proposed by Cunha (2004) between phase and non phase eventualities, we establish a correlation between the distribution of BN and indefinites in preverbal subject position in EP and different types of predicates. Having summarized the patterns obtained by the data description, we combine (following Duarte et al., 2002, and Oliveira et al., 2006) the predicate value of each of the considered predicates and their corresponding subject value, in order to account for the properties of the BNs and indefinites preverbal subjects in EP, namely with respect to the generic contexts that allow them. It will be showed that both indefinites and BNs behave differently in such position depending on their singular or plural form.

Transactions of the Philological Society, 2011

This paper offers a corpus-based study of the (restricted) modification patterns of predicatively used bare nouns in French (e.g. Je suis bon catholique 'I am a good Catholic'). These are 'truly' bare in that they do not rely on a covert determiner. The aim of the paper is to determine which modification patterns are allowed and to provide a semantic-functional explanation. Further, on the basis of this study, some conclusions can be drawn both about the categorial status of the bare predicative noun and about the internal architecture of type specification, the innermost functional layer within the NP. More specifically, the study of bare nouns leads to the identification of several lower-level slots that are independent of the instantiation of a particular nominal entity in conceptual space. These are to be distinguished from higher-level modifiers. To end, some additional syntactic contexts are provided in which bare nouns occur. These display identical restrictions with respect to modification, but differ in the array of lexical heads they allow for.

Advances in Italian Dialectology, 2018

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2008

In English and French relational adjectives occurring in construction with deverbal nominalizations can be thematically associated with subject as well as object arguments. By contrast, in German object-related readings of relational adjectives seem to be inadmissible. The greater flexibility of English and French in terms of the thematic interpretability of relational adjectives also shows up with respect to 'circumstantial' thematic roles like directionals, locatives and instrumentals. It is arguably due to the common Latin heritage of English and French, since in Latin relational adjectives representing subject or object arguments of nominalizations are widely attested. However, even in English and French object-related readings are confined to result nominalizations, a restriction we suggest to account for in terms of the more 'noun-like' character of result nominalizations in contrast to process nominalizations. Moreover, since argumentrelated interpretations of relational adjectives can always be overridden by appropriate agentive/patientive phrases, relational adjectives cannot be analyzed as occupying an argument position, but rather as modifying the semantic role associated with it. 1

Quaderni di lavoro dell'ASIS, 2006

2021

Building on recent findings in Bernstein et al. (2019), regarding the syntactic distribution of personal articles in Catalan and honorifics in Spanish, I propose that they are pure expressives (in Potts’ (2005) sense) that take an entity as argument and return the same entity at the at-issue level and a conventionally implicated proposition in a parallel meaning dimension. If this analysis turns out to be correct, the expressive / proper name interaction in these languages will constitute a new piece of evidence against the predicative analysis of proper names.

2002

This article argues that the Italian plural indefinite article dei and its French counterpart is a partitive structure without an overt numeral. Unlike a similar proposal in (Chierchia 1998a), the present account crucially holds that the definite DP embedded in these Ôdefective partitivesÕ is a kind-denoting DP. This assumption derives the lack of existence presupposition, the absence of cardinal numerals after dei, the restrictions to certain types of DPs, the failure of ne-extraction and various other properties of this construction. * Thanks to Alan Munn and Valentina Bianchi for comments and corrections. Special thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Studia Linguistica, whose comments almost exceeded the length of the paper. All remaining errors are of course my own.

Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2020

This article studies the formal variation of the masculine singular forms of the quantifiers u/un 'one', algú/algun 'someone, some', ningú/ningun 'no-one, anyone, not one, any, none' and cada u/cada un 'everyone, each one' in contemporary Catalan. The standard uses of these forms are contrasted with dialectal uses, obtained from a thorough search in oral and written corpora. In addition, they are compared with the uses in the other Romance languages and with their historical evolution in Catalan. The whole set of data, and especially the dialectal information on the Valencian area, allow us to explain the various factors that have interacted in the variation and formal change of these quantifiers. Among these factors, the fundamental role of pragmatics stands out above the rest. It is shown that, given the polysemy and synonymy caused by vacillations between the variants of the quantifiers, strategies are sought to improve communicative effectiveness, so that the differentiation between form and function becomes firmly established in the majority of quantifiers. Other prominent factors are those of analogical and, above all, phonological nature, which, on the one hand, explain the syncretism of the form un, and, on the other, enable us to understand the reasons why in the Valencian area there is a process of substitution of genuine forms by borrowings from Spanish.

The study of pronouns has focused on personal pronouns replacing Determiner Phrases (DPs), paying little attention to pro-forms like English one(s) and Italian ne, which re- place subparts of DPs, namely Noun Phrases (NPs). Although ne should be functionally equivalent to one, the two forms seem to obey different constraints. In this paper, we argue that the differences are superficial, and can be ascribed to independent properties of Italian and English. We show that the diverging acceptability of one(s) and ne when these forms appear ‘bare’, i.e. without a determiner, confirms a Carlsonian view of bare nouns, but points to a difference between English and Italian existential bare nouns. We study the conditions for bare ne and show that they shed light on verbs and verb uses which take objects only as representatives of their kinds.