Revisiting aspectual se in Spanish: telicity, statives, and maximization

This paper addresses aspectual se in Spanish. Building on the previous analyses that have been proposed in the literature to account for constructions with aspectual se that mainly focus on the syntax of these (see, e.g., MacDonald, Jonathan E. 2017. Spanish aspectual se as an indirect object reflexive: The import of atelicity, bare nouns, and leísta PCC repairs. Probus. International Journal of Romance Linguistics 29(1). 73–118), this paper provides a semantic account that makes explicit (i) why dynamic predicates must be telic in the presence of se, and (ii) why the very same se can appear with a limited number of stative predicates, which are atelic. The account is implemented in the Figure/Path Relation model in Beavers, John. 2011. On affectedness. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29(2). 335–370, Figure/Path Relation model. I propose a maximization strategy that captures that dynamic predicates in constructions with se are always telic by indicating the conditions under which the theme has a fixed quantity and the scale/path that may be associated with the verb is bounded. This maximization strategy is then compared to and distinguished from the event maximization strategies proposed for Slavic languages (Filip, Hana. 2008. Events and maximalization: The case of telicity and perfectivity. In Susan Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, 217–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Hungarian (Kardos, Éva. 2016. Telicity marking in Hungarian. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 1(1). 1–37), and to the scale/path maximization strategy proposed for Southern Aymara (Martínez Vera, Gabriel. 2021a. Degree achievements and degree morphemes in competition in Southern Aymara. Linguistics and Philosophy 44. 695–735).

The Semantics of Chinese Noun Phrases

Chinese nominal phrases are typologically distinct from their English counterparts in many aspects. Most strikingly, Chinese is featured with a general classifier system, which not only helps to categorize nouns but also has to do with the issue of quantification. Moreover, it has neither noncontroversial plural markers nor (in)definite markers. Its bare nouns are allowed in various argument positions. As a consequence, Chinese is sometimes characterized as a classifier language, as an argumental language, or as an article-less language. One of the questions arising is whether these apparently different but related properties underscore a single issue: that it is the semantics of nouns that is responsible for all these peculiarities of Mandarin nominal phrases. It has been claimed that Chinese nouns are born as kind terms, from which the object-level readings can be derived, being either existential or definite. Nevertheless, the existence of classifiers in Chinese is claimed to be independent of the kind denotation of its bare nouns. Within the general area of noun semantics, a number of other semantic issues have generated much interest. One is concerned with the availability of the mass/count distinction in Mandarin nominal phrases. Another issue has to do with the semantics of classifiers. Are classifiers required by the noun semantics or the numeral semantics, when occurring in the syntactic context of Numeral/Quantifier-Classifier-Noun? Finally, how is the semantic notion of definiteness understood in article-less languages like Mandarin Chinese? Should its denotation be characterized with uniqueness or familiarity?

Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization.

Bare Nouns and Number

Bare nouns are noun phrases with a common noun lacking an overt determiner. Depending on the theoretical framework at hand, and the syntax–semantics interface adopted, they are analysed as NPs, NumPs, or DPs with an empty (null) D. No information on singular/plural, mass/count, definite/indefinite reference can be derived from the determiner if there is none (in overt syntax, at least), so bare nouns raise challenges to syntactic theory as well as compositional semantics. Much of the literature zooms in on the implications of a missing/covert D, but this chapter places special emphasis on syntactic and semantic number in bare nouns.

The Puzzle of Anaphoric Bare Nouns in Mandarin: A Counterpoint to Index!

Jenks (2018) argues that Mandarin bare NPs cannot be classified as definites simpliciter. Adopting the distinction between weak and strong article definites in Schwarz (2009), he proposes that Mandarin makes a lexical distinction between the two types of definites: bare nouns are weak definites, demonstratives are strong definites. He further proposes that their distribution is regulated by a principle called Index!. In this article we first point out some problems with the empirical generalizations presented in Jenks’ description of Mandarin and then sketch out an alternative approach to the distinction between Mandarin demonstratives and bare nouns. We end with some comments about the kind of further empirical work that needs to be done before definitive claims can be made about the competition between demonstratives and other types of definites.

Marking definiteness in an articleless language

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz 2009, 2013; Jenks 2018); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).

Anti-uniqueness without articles

We report on the expression of singular nominals in Burmese, an articleless language, from original elicitation work. Bare nouns are interpreted as singular definites, to which the numeral tiq 'one' is added to form indefinites. We propose that tiq 'one' restricts the domain of the nominal to a singleton, and that its addition is subject to a Non-Vacuity constraint; this is the source of the anti-uniqueness inference of indefinites. We furthermore investigate the availability of tiq 'one' in anaphoric definites. Such behavior forms an argument that the compositional semantics of anaphoric definites does not involve contextual restriction via a situation variable, unlike unique definites.