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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Friday, January 31, 3:30pm in 460-126:
The Semantics of Incorporation: Bare Nominals in Hungarian
Donka Farkas (in collaboration with Henriette de Swart)
In this talk I present joint work with Henriette de Swart on the semantics
of bare singulars and bare plurals in Hungarian.
The first part of the talk is concerned with accounting for the semantic
contrasts between the minimal pair in (1) and (2), where (1) involves an
ordinary indefinite, while (2) involves an 'incorporated' bare singular in
a special pre-verbal position:
(1) Mari olvas egy verset.
Mari reads a poem.Acc
(2) Mari verset olvas.
Mari poem.Acc reads
Although (1) and (2) are truth-conditionally equivalent, bare singulars,
unlike ordinary indefinites are scopally inert, number neutral and
discourse opaque. The analysis we propose is couched in a version of DRT
that distinguishes between thematic arguments and discourse referents,
needed for independent reasons (cf. Koenig and Mauner 2000, Kamp and
Rossdeutscher 1994). In the account we present the semantic properties of
bare singulars in Hungarian that are connected to those of implicit arguments
in agentless passives such as (3).
(3) The ship was sunk.
Since number neutrality is a pervasive property of bare singulars that has
received relatively little attention (except for Dayal 1999), we will go
into the details of number interpretation here.
In the second part of the talk we account for the contrasts between (2)
and (4), deriving them from the presence of plural morphology:
(4) Mari verseket olvas.
Mari poem.Pl.Acc reads
The talk ends with a brief comparison of the proposed analyses with two of
its close relatives, Van Geenhoven 1998 and Chung and Ladusaw (to
appear).
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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