Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan

Espinal, M. Teresa; McNally, Louise

doi:10.1017/s0022226710000228

Cited by 97 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…5 We conclude that there is no asymmetry between bare singulars and bare plurals in the grammar of coordination: 4 We can also find Spanish examples of this type, as in (i) However, it is uncertain whether these have the same status as the bare coordination constructions in (23)-(25). The complement of a have verb or the existential hay construction tolerates bare singular count nouns more generally, as an instance of pseudo-incorporation, as observed by Espinal and McNally (2010). So the coordination data have little additional value.…”

Section: Existential Interpretations Of Coordinated Bare Singularsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bruyn

Swart

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper develops an analysis of the syntax-semantics interface of two types of split coordination structures. In the first type, two bare singular count nouns appear as arguments in a coordinated structure, as in bride and groom were happy. We call this the N&N construction. In the second type, the determiner shows agreement with the first conjunct, while the second conjunct is bare, as in the Spanish example el hornero y hornera cobraban en panes ('the sg.m baker sg.m and baker sg.f were pl paid in bread loaves'). We call this the DN&N construction. Both N&N and DN&N constructions are common in languages that otherwise require an article or determiner on singular count nouns in regular argument position, and give rise to 'split' readings that cannot be accounted for by the standard semantics of conjunction in terms of set intersection. Furthermore, they are restricted to instances of 'natural' coordination.We formalize the semantics of split conjunction in terms of intersection between sets of matching pairs, which correlates with the lexical semantics and pragmatics of natural coordination. We maintain that an N&N construction gets either a definite or an indefinite interpretation by covert type-shifting, because projection of an article ranging over the coordination as a whole is blocked in languages like English and Spanish. For DN&N structures, we propose a syntactic structure in which D is in construction with the first conjunct. Coordination with a second, bare conjunct requires a covert type-shift that is licensed only under the special matchmaking semantics of conjunction. The analysis addresses a range of issues these coordinate structures raise about syntactic and semantic agreement, in particular with respect to number. Next to English and Spanish we will look into Dutch and French in detail.

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Section: Existential Interpretations Of Coordinated Bare Singularsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bruyn

Swart

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…The most advanced analysis we are aware of is the one proposed by Espinal & McNally (2011) for Catalan and Spanish. They propose a lexical rule by which verbs denoting situations that depend on the existence of a have-relation can be shifted from verbs taking e-type objects to verbs taking <e,t>-type objects.…”

Section: With Without and Incorporation Havementioning

confidence: 99%

'Have', 'with' and 'without'

Bruyn¹,

Swart²,

Zwarts³

2015

SALT

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The research reported in this paper is part of our attempt to get to a deeper understanding of why with and without are special prepositions in taking singular bare nouns more easily than other prepositions. The paper focuses on the semantics of existential and incorporation have, which we take to be the same and to constitute the verbal counterpart of with and without. We propose existential/incorporation have builds relations: it selects one-place predicates and turns them into two-place predicates.

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“…In French, pseudo incorporation marginally occurs in existential contexts (il y a fête dans le village ce soir 'there is party in the village tonight), but Spanish, Catalan and Norwegian allow a much wider range of verbs to productively take bare nominal objects (cf. Borthen 2003, Espinal & McNally 2011 and see Section 4.2 below).…”

Section: Weakly Referential Bare Nominals In English Dutch and Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pseudo-incorporation is associated with property denotations of bare noun as modifiers of the verb, rather than full-fledged arguments (Van Geenhoven 1998, Farkas & de Swart 2003, Chung & Ladusaw 2004, Dobrovie-Sorin et al 2006, Espinal & McNally 2011, Dayal 2011, this volume, although see Dobrovie-Sorin & Giurgea, this volume for some critical remarks on this view). In Romance languages, pseudo-incorporation is found productively in Spanish, Catalan and Romanian (Espinal & McNally 2011, Dobrovie-Sorin et al 2006 Incorporated nominals have reduced discourse transparency, and are more easily picked up by type-level anaphoric expressions like dét ('that') in (34c), than by token-level anaphoric pronouns like den ('it') (Borthen 2003).…”

Section: Pseudo-incorporationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructions with and without Articles

de Swart

2015

The Syntax and Semantics of Pseudo-Incorporation

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Even in languages with a well-developed system of articles, such as Germanic and Romance languages, we find constructions in which the noun can appear without an article. Such constructions are often related to pseudo incorporation (cf. Borik & Gehrke, this volume), but this paper takes a broader perspective in terms of 'weak referentiality', and provides a roadmap for within and crosslinguistic variation. Bare nouns are sometimes in complementary distribution with the indefinite article (in predication, incorporation, with/without PPs), and sometimes with the definite article (in (the) hospital, play (the) piano). There is a third class of bare constructions which is neither definite nor indefinite, but plural or quantificational in nature. Here we find bare coordination (mother and child), reduplication (English from door to door = many doors in succession) and bare PPs like Dutch per jaar (= each year). The three classes are shown to be subject to different constraints within and across languages, due to the interaction of lexicon, syntax and semantics.

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Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan

Cited by 97 publications

References 41 publications

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

'Have', 'with' and 'without'

Constructions with and without Articles

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