My main goal is to explain why SE-passives but not past participle passives are subject to the Pe... more My main goal is to explain why SE-passives but not past participle passives are subject to the Person Constraint (PC). The core hypothesis will be that the Agent of passives is not syntactically projected in an A-position, but only represented by a valued +ARB feature, which may attach not only to little v, but also to Tense. These two possibilities respectively characterize past participle passives and SE-passives. Given these assumptions, the PC on SE-passives is explained as being due to the fact that the Person feature on Tense is already valued as +ARB, which prevents the subjects of SE-passives from checking Person features. Those DPs that do not carry Person features do not need to enter an AGREE relation in Person (but only in Number), and as such they are allowed as subjects of SE-passives. Past participle passives are immune to the PC because the +ARB feature is valued on little v, which leaves Tense unvalued for Person, which allows it to act as a Probe for DPs that carry not only Number, but also Person.
This paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and in particular of the proporti... more This paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and in particular of the proportional readings of many. Can we account for the proportional readings of many by assuming a uniform analysis, according to which many is a cardinality predicate, or do we need to postulate an ambiguity between a cardinality predicate and a quantificational determiner (Partee 1989)? I will argue in favour of the uniform analysis by comparing proportional most with proportional many: it will be shown that the former is necessarily a quantificational determiner (as in Generalized Quantifier theory, contra Hackl 2009), whereas the latter is a cardinality predicate inside a strong indefinite DP. This somewhat paradoxical result (a strong DP built with weak many) will be given a compositional semantics by assuming that constituents of the form many NP are headed by a null Determiner that has the semantics of plural some.
... Ni-uean is an oceanic language which has been described as a noun-incorporating language (Sei... more ... Ni-uean is an oceanic language which has been described as a noun-incorporating language (Seiter 1980) because bare nominals (those having no grammatical mor-phemes such as Case marking or ... Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Tonia Bleam and M. Teresa Espinal functional ...
ont des interprétations de type passif ou de type moyen en fonction de la position syntaxique occ... more ont des interprétations de type passif ou de type moyen en fonction de la position syntaxique occupée par leur sujet. Cette généralisation couvre les observations de Stéfanini (1962), Ruwet (1972) et Raposo & Uriagereka (1996), concernant d'une part le français et d'autre ...
... that pronominal cliticization involves adjunction to IP rather than to I (I argue below that ... more ... that pronominal cliticization involves adjunction to IP rather than to I (I argue below that adverbialclitics are the only Rumanian clitics that adjoin to I itself) may be derived independently as a consequence of a well-formedness condition on clitic chains: a pronominal clitic must c ...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022
In this paper, we observe that although all positive indefinites, in particular some-pronouns and... more In this paper, we observe that although all positive indefinites, in particular some-pronouns and some-NPs, qualify as Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), they do not exhibit a uniform behavior when occurring in the so-called 'rescuing contexts' as only the former are possible. In order to solve this puzzle, we will propose that anti-licensing and rescuing contexts respectively pertain to narrative/descriptive and argumentative discourse, and correlate with different ways in which sentential negation translates: in narrative/descriptive contexts, sentential negation is interpreted as quantificational negation and in argumentative contexts as propositional negation. Given this hypothesis, the contrast between some-pronouns and some-NPs in rescuing contexts can be explained by observing that the former are weak indefinites, whereas the latter are strong indefinites. Weak positive indefinites can take scope within propositional negation, whereas strong positive indefinites cannot do so. In anti-licensing contexts, on the other hand, sentential negation is interpreted as quantificational negation, which bans any kind of positive indefinite (due to an extended version of Collins & Postal's (2004) Determiner Sharing condition on polyadic quantification).
The paper explains the contrast between the generic readings of bare singulars (BSs) and definite... more The paper explains the contrast between the generic readings of bare singulars (BSs) and definite singulars (DSs) in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), which have so far gone unnoticed. BSs in BrP behave like kind-denoting bare plurals (BPs) in English: they may refer to non-well-established kinds, whereas DSs cannot, unless in a comparison context; conversely, DSs can occur in the object position of predicates such as inventar 'to invent', whereas BSs cannot. Although both DSs and BSs denote kinds in BrP (Schmitt & Munn 1999 among others, contra Müller 2002), they do so through different semantic mechanisms. Kind-referring DSs (in BrP as well as in English) are built by applying the iota operator to a property of kinds (Dayal 2004). Kind-referring BSs (in BrP) rely on Chierchia's (1998) down operator, which can apply both to pluralities and to number-neutral expressions, yielding intensional maximal sets.
It is currently assumed that most can quantify over mass domains [12][14]. The crosslinguistic da... more It is currently assumed that most can quantify over mass domains [12][14]. The crosslinguistic data (English, Romanian, Hungarian and German) examined in the paper indicates that this is true of entity (type e)-restrictor most but not of set (type <e,t>)-restrictor most, which strongly supports the view that mass quantifiers denote relations between entities rather than relations between sets [26] [21] [14]. Nevertheless my proposal differs from previous proposals in assuming a more constrained view of the syntax-semantics mapping.
My main goal is to explain why SE-passives but not past participle passives are subject to the Pe... more My main goal is to explain why SE-passives but not past participle passives are subject to the Person Constraint (PC). The core hypothesis will be that the Agent of passives is not syntactically projected in an A-position, but only represented by a valued +ARB feature, which may attach not only to little v, but also to Tense. These two possibilities respectively characterize past participle passives and SE-passives. Given these assumptions, the PC on SE-passives is explained as being due to the fact that the Person feature on Tense is already valued as +ARB, which prevents the subjects of SE-passives from checking Person features. Those DPs that do not carry Person features do not need to enter an AGREE relation in Person (but only in Number), and as such they are allowed as subjects of SE-passives. Past participle passives are immune to the PC because the +ARB feature is valued on little v, which leaves Tense unvalued for Person, which allows it to act as a Probe for DPs that carry not only Number, but also Person.
This paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and in particular of the proporti... more This paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and in particular of the proportional readings of many. Can we account for the proportional readings of many by assuming a uniform analysis, according to which many is a cardinality predicate, or do we need to postulate an ambiguity between a cardinality predicate and a quantificational determiner (Partee 1989)? I will argue in favour of the uniform analysis by comparing proportional most with proportional many: it will be shown that the former is necessarily a quantificational determiner (as in Generalized Quantifier theory, contra Hackl 2009), whereas the latter is a cardinality predicate inside a strong indefinite DP. This somewhat paradoxical result (a strong DP built with weak many) will be given a compositional semantics by assuming that constituents of the form many NP are headed by a null Determiner that has the semantics of plural some.
... Ni-uean is an oceanic language which has been described as a noun-incorporating language (Sei... more ... Ni-uean is an oceanic language which has been described as a noun-incorporating language (Seiter 1980) because bare nominals (those having no grammatical mor-phemes such as Case marking or ... Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Tonia Bleam and M. Teresa Espinal functional ...
ont des interprétations de type passif ou de type moyen en fonction de la position syntaxique occ... more ont des interprétations de type passif ou de type moyen en fonction de la position syntaxique occupée par leur sujet. Cette généralisation couvre les observations de Stéfanini (1962), Ruwet (1972) et Raposo & Uriagereka (1996), concernant d'une part le français et d'autre ...
... that pronominal cliticization involves adjunction to IP rather than to I (I argue below that ... more ... that pronominal cliticization involves adjunction to IP rather than to I (I argue below that adverbialclitics are the only Rumanian clitics that adjoin to I itself) may be derived independently as a consequence of a well-formedness condition on clitic chains: a pronominal clitic must c ...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022
In this paper, we observe that although all positive indefinites, in particular some-pronouns and... more In this paper, we observe that although all positive indefinites, in particular some-pronouns and some-NPs, qualify as Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), they do not exhibit a uniform behavior when occurring in the so-called &#39;rescuing contexts&#39; as only the former are possible. In order to solve this puzzle, we will propose that anti-licensing and rescuing contexts respectively pertain to narrative/descriptive and argumentative discourse, and correlate with different ways in which sentential negation translates: in narrative/descriptive contexts, sentential negation is interpreted as quantificational negation and in argumentative contexts as propositional negation. Given this hypothesis, the contrast between some-pronouns and some-NPs in rescuing contexts can be explained by observing that the former are weak indefinites, whereas the latter are strong indefinites. Weak positive indefinites can take scope within propositional negation, whereas strong positive indefinites cannot do so. In anti-licensing contexts, on the other hand, sentential negation is interpreted as quantificational negation, which bans any kind of positive indefinite (due to an extended version of Collins &amp; Postal&#39;s (2004) Determiner Sharing condition on polyadic quantification).
The paper explains the contrast between the generic readings of bare singulars (BSs) and definite... more The paper explains the contrast between the generic readings of bare singulars (BSs) and definite singulars (DSs) in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), which have so far gone unnoticed. BSs in BrP behave like kind-denoting bare plurals (BPs) in English: they may refer to non-well-established kinds, whereas DSs cannot, unless in a comparison context; conversely, DSs can occur in the object position of predicates such as inventar 'to invent', whereas BSs cannot. Although both DSs and BSs denote kinds in BrP (Schmitt & Munn 1999 among others, contra Müller 2002), they do so through different semantic mechanisms. Kind-referring DSs (in BrP as well as in English) are built by applying the iota operator to a property of kinds (Dayal 2004). Kind-referring BSs (in BrP) rely on Chierchia's (1998) down operator, which can apply both to pluralities and to number-neutral expressions, yielding intensional maximal sets.
It is currently assumed that most can quantify over mass domains [12][14]. The crosslinguistic da... more It is currently assumed that most can quantify over mass domains [12][14]. The crosslinguistic data (English, Romanian, Hungarian and German) examined in the paper indicates that this is true of entity (type e)-restrictor most but not of set (type <e,t>)-restrictor most, which strongly supports the view that mass quantifiers denote relations between entities rather than relations between sets [26] [21] [14]. Nevertheless my proposal differs from previous proposals in assuming a more constrained view of the syntax-semantics mapping.
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