Less form – more meaning: Why bare singular nouns are special

Swart, H.E. de; Zwarts, Joost

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.10.015

Cited by 46 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Such coordinate structures are unusual, because languages like English, Spanish and Dutch normally require an article or other determiner on singular count nouns in regular argument position. 1 The fact that we find bare count nouns in coordination makes this a "bare construction" in the sense of de Swart and Zwarts (2009), along with bare predication, bare prepositional phrases, bare titles, bare noun incorporation, etc. Bare 1 In this paper, we take it for granted that a lexical distinction between count and mass nouns can be established for bare nouns.…”

Section: Bare Coordination Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bruyn

Swart

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Bare Coordination Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bruyn

Swart

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…But there is more. The examples in (6) are from an earlier investigation of weak referentiality in English (de Swart and Zwarts 2009 As the examples in (6) indicate, bare nominals appear in predicative contexts (6a), but also in the object position of certain verbs, a construction often associated with incorporation (6b), in the complement position of certain prepositions (6c) (Stvan 1998), in coordination constructions (6d) (Heycock & Zamparelli 2003), and in reduplicated constructions like (6e) (Jackendoff 2008). Follow-up work by Baldwin et al (2006), and empirical research on Dutch and French suggest more fine-grained distinctions within these categories: The three languages have a range of weakly referential constructions in common.…”

Section: Weakly Referential Bare Nominals In English Dutch and Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In languages that allow both bare and indefinite phrases in predicative position, this leads to subtle meaning differences between predication with and without articles with capacity nouns. Given that CAP is exclusively associated with bare predication, REL is interpreted in such configurations as the complement denotation of the capacity (de Swart & Zwarts 2009):…”

Section: Bare Nominals and Indefinites In Predicative Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructions with and without Articles

de Swart

2015

The Syntax and Semantics of Pseudo-Incorporation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…He suggests three classificatory categories with the notion of nominal mapping parameters. Contrastingly, the OT analysis of de Swart & Zwarts (2009 do not assume that morpho-syntactic features should be collapsed with countability and plurality. They propose several general constraints governing nominal forms and argue that different ordering of the constraints in optimality accounts for different nominal forms crosslinguistically.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Typological Accounts for Nominal Forms

Kwak¹

2012

J. Univers. Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Various linguistic phenomena may serve a basis for the classification of languages and nominal forms make part of the criteria for the classification. In this study, two major approaches are closely compared for language typology based on nominal forms. Chierchia (1998a, b) assumes that morpho-syntactic features should be crucial in determining the denotations and grammatical categories of NPs. He suggests three classificatory categories with the notion of nominal mapping parameters. Contrastingly, the OT analysis of de Swart & Zwarts (2009 do not assume that morpho-syntactic features should be collapsed with countability and plurality. They propose several general constraints governing nominal forms and argue that different ordering of the constraints in optimality accounts for different nominal forms crosslinguistically. I have shown that the OT Eun-Joo Kwak Department of English Language and Literature, Sejong University 98 Gunja-dong, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul 143-747, Korea Phone: +82-2-3408-3633; Email: ejkwak@sejong.ac.kr Received September 8, 2011; Revised October 30, 2011; Accepted November 17, 2011. 102 Typological Accounts for Nominal Forms analysis provides an appropriate framework to categorize languages systematically.

show abstract

Less form – more meaning: Why bare singular nouns are special

Cited by 46 publications

References 27 publications

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Bare coordination: the semantic shift

Constructions with and without Articles

Typological Accounts for Nominal Forms

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About