The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, October 21, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
Varya Tiutiunnikova (McGill) will be presenting “Bare NPs are choice functions in Uralic languages.” Here is the abstract:
Chierchia (1998) and Dayal (2004) proposed a unified approach to the interpretation of bare nouns in articleless languages. Bare NPs start as type <et> and appear in argument positions via type-shifting. The availability of the type-shifts is predicted by the Meaning Preservation (1). What is important here, is that the iota (ι) is ranked higher than the existential shift (∃), thus predicting that bare singulars will be definites, rather than indefinites. This has a strong implication: bare singulars are scopeless. (I am not going to touch ∩ and bare plurals in this talk).
(1) {∩, ι} > ∃
I will show that in two Uralic languages (Kazym Khanty and Northern Mansi) bare NPs (1) can have existential interpretations; (2) can take various scope and even outscope islands. This data poses a challenge for Dayal’s Neo-Carlsonian theory, and I will argue for the choice-functional approach to bare nouns.