Course Description
Approximately half of the world’s languages lack definite and/or indefinite articles, which means that at least half of the world’s languages allow bare nominals to serve as arguments. This course takes on the challenge of predicting the range of possible meanings for such bare arguments, based on findings from a questionnaire-based survey of seven unrelated languages (to appear in The Open Handbook of (In)definiteness: a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Interpreting Bare Arguments) as well as on facts reported in the literature. Focusing on differences among nominal forms along two dimensions, overt number marking and overt definiteness marking, it addresses questions such as the following:
- What forms do languages use to make kind-level statements?
- How do available lexical options influence the definite or indefinite interpretations of bare nominals?
- How does the strong/weak distinction in article systems apply to bare nominals?
- Can the generic/kind-level readings of bare nominals and (pseudo-)incorporated readings be conflated?
- Is there such a thing as an optional plural morpheme or an optional pluralization strategy in languages where the unmarked nominal is itself number neutral?
- Do bare nominals project NPs or DPs across languages?
Area Tags: Syntax, Semantics, Variation, Typology, Syntax-Semantics Interface
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 9:00-10:20
Location: ILC N400
Instructor: Veneeta Dayal (Fillmore Professor)
Veneeta Dayal is the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Dayal’s research focuses on the semantics of natural language, and its interface with syntax and pragmatics, typically from a cross-linguistic perspective. The topics she has worked on can be classified under four broad categories: Questions and relative clauses; Bare nominals and genericity; Free choice items; and the Syntactic structure of Hindi. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of “Questions” published by Oxford University Press, “Locality in Wh Quantification,” published by Springer, and the co-editor of “Clause Structure in South Asian languages,” published by Kluwer.
