Introduction. The semantics of nominals

Abstract

This special volume presents a series of papers which all deal with the semantics of nominal expressions.It has long been clear that the relatively simple picture of the relationship between syntactic category and semantic type on which all noun phrases denote generalized quantifiers, while perhaps feasible to maintain, is an idealization that does little to advance our understanding of the great richness and variety in the semantics of nominals that is attested in the world's languages. In the last thirty years, this picture has grown progressively more complex along at least two dimensions that we would like to emphasize here.Since the early 1980s many researchers have explored the possibility that the nominal expressions found in syntactic argument positions do not all belong to the same semantic type (see Partee 1987 for a comprehensive discussion). Kamp (1984) and Heim (1982) provided strong evidence that many noun phrases lack quantificational force and thus should be given a non-quantificational analysis. Partee and Rooth (1983) argued that NPs should be able to type shift between entity and quantifier-type denotations. Pustejovsky (1995) proposed expanding the inventory of type-shifting functions to cover certain cases in which NPs are acceptable in argument positions where a type clash would be expected. Romero's contribution to this volume can be considered as belonging to this general line: she argues that both the NP complements to concealed question verbs such as know and the subjects of specificational copular sentences, contrary to what it might appear superficially, denote propositions (modeled as sets of worlds). Still another line of research on the semantic type of NPs has centered around modeling noun phrases semantically as choice functions (Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998.In the early 1990s, some researchers began to pursue the idea that nominals in non-predicative positions might denote properties, as opposed to quantifiers or entities (see e.g. de Hoop 1992;McNally 1992McNally , 1995Ladusaw 1994; * We would like to thank all the contributors for their papers and for their cooperation during the editing process. We are also very grateful to all of our referees, who provided careful and very helpful comments on the papers. Finally, thanks to Tom Rozario for his help with the preparation of the manuscripts.

Reference to kinds and to other generic expressions in Spanish: definiteness and number

“…In the syntactically oriented literature, it is standardly assumed that the type shifting operation is the semantic function attributed to the Determiner (Longobardi 1991(Longobardi , 1994(Longobardi , 2005Chierchia 1998), which type-shifts a property (a predicate) into an entity (an argument) (cf. Espinal and McNally 2004).…”