The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 16, 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
Sama’a Salama (McGill) will be presenting “Severing maximality from the definite article.” Here is the abstract:
In this paper I argue for the decomposition of the widely adopted Sharvy (1980) definite article, into the Fregean (1892) definite article and a distributive max operator, as in (1). I rely on evidence from cases where the scope of MAX is not in the immediate scope of the definite article (specifically iota), thus floating and requiring severance.
(1) [ The [max pl[boy]] ]
This thus turns MAX from an object in the meta language into an operator, meaning that maximality exists in the actual syntax rather than as a presupposition.
Ultimately, this work asks if and what necessitates that maximality be baked into the definite article and demonstrates that one type of evidence for the severing of the MAX operator comes in the form of scope, specifically MAX scoping at a site that is not in the immediate scope of iota. If such a structure indeed exists then this floating MAX would require severing and could not be captured under Sharvy’s definition.
This paper focuses on applications of the definite article that require MAX to be applied as an independent operator; specifically via evidence from higher-order pluralities, which, as I will demonstrate, are a prime example of a case where MAX ”floats” out of the immediate scope of the definite article.