A Semantics for the English Existential Construction

McNally, Louise

doi:10.4324/9781315536491

Cited by 38 publications

(61 citation statements)

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“…Such examples (which have been studied by Löbner 1985;Kadmon 1987;McNally 1992McNally , 1998Poesio 1994;Rawlins 2005Rawlins , 2006Barker 2004, i.a. ) are limited to definite noun phrases headed by relational nouns followed by of PPs in which the object is not accompanied by the possessive marker 's.…”

Section: Uniqueness Without Existencementioning

confidence: 99%

Definiteness and determinacy

Coppock

Beaver

2015

Linguist and Philos

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This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like 'Anna didn't give the only invited talk at the conference', which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of 'only invited talk at the conference'. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether possessives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them.

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Section: Uniqueness Without Existencementioning

confidence: 99%

Definiteness and determinacy

Coppock

Beaver

2015

Linguist and Philos

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“…19 It has been argued in the literature (Williams 1984;McNally 1992;Moro 1997;Law 1999) that all the material following the associate in progressive existentials is actually contained inside a reduced relative clause (RRC) and is not part of the main clause (cf. (i)).…”

Section: Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

To be or not to be elided: VP ellipsis revisited

Aelbrecht¹,

Harwood²

2015

Lingua

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The main question that this paper addresses is: what happens to nonfinite auxiliaries under English VP ellipsis (VPE)? Do they remain overt like finite auxiliaries, or do they disappear together with lexical verbs? Akmajian & Wasow (1975) and Sag (1976) observed the following pattern: nonfinite have always stays overt, being is obligatorily elided, and be and been are optionally elided. We provide an analysis for this pattern.As preliminaries for our account we follow Chomsky (1993) and Lasnik (1995b) in assuming that English auxiliaries carry uninterpretable inflectional features which force the auxiliary to raise to the relevant inflectional head for feature checking at PF.As we argue that VPE includes the progressive projections in the ellipsis site, but nothing higher, the have and being data automatically fall out: have is base-generated outside the ellipsis site, so is never elided, whilst being's landing site is inside the ellipsis site, so being is always elided. For be and been, which are base-generated in the ellipsis site and raise out of it to get their inflectional features checked, we take an optional raising approach: in non-elliptical sentences raising is obligatory, otherwise the derivation crashes at PF because of unchecked features. Ellipsis contexts, on the other hand, provide the option of not raising for be and been, because ellipsis then deletes be and been in their base positions, along with their unchecked features, avoiding the PF violation.We extend this account to other phenomena, such as VP fronting, tag questions, pseudoclefts and predicate inversion. Furthermore, we speculate that progressive aspect is in fact part of the predicate layer of the clause. This implies that the target of VPE can be characterised as the highest predicate projection of the clause, which makes VPE actually predicate ellipsis.

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“…Thus, I will neither summarize the proposals in this paper nor repeat the discussions and criticisms but refer the reader to the relevant literature. In particular, Lumsden (1988), McNally (1992, and Zucchi (1992Zucchi ( , 1995 provide excellent surveys. Here I will only very briefly report on the three main approaches to the TCE and sketch why they fail.…”

Section: Previous Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%