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Montague’s classic article “The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English” (PTQ, 1973) treated all NP occurrences as quantificational. Partee’s article “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” (1987) reconciles PTQ’s uniform quantificational strategy with the older distinction between three NP types: entities, predicates and quantifiers. On top of this distinction, Partee introduces operators that allow shifting the denotation of an NP to a different type than the one it is initially assigned. Using these type-shifters, one and the same NP may receive each of the three interpretations. In addition to this synthesis of previous approaches, Partee’s article contains a rather elaborate analysis of predicative NPs, as well as insightful hints about the treatment of definite NPs, nominalization phenomena, plural, mass and generic NPs, and the mathematical principles underlying type-shifting. At a more global level, Partee’s article marks a methodological transition in formal semantics, highlighting general principles that are relevant to different languages and to different linguistic frameworks, rather than technicalities of artificial language fragments. This general account and the new ways it opened for semantic theory, together with the paper’s lucid and friendly style, have made “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” one of the modern classics in formal semantics. After some necessary background on NPs in PTQ, this review covers the main innovations in Partee’s article, and comments on the work and its influence.

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the ques0on of how they relate, on the one hand, to objec0ve reality and, on the other, to subjec0ve experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analy0c philosophers for over a century, it is only rela0vely recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make a contribu0on of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical-specifically, corpus linguis0c-study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjec0vity at the linguis0c level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigma0cally subjec0ve predicates.

Focusing on the case of deverbal gradable adjectives such as acquainted, we show that the selective behavior of degree modifiers such as very and well provides an important prove on the semantic typology of adjectives. Specifically, we demonstrate that the distribution of degree modifiers is closely tied to the scalar structure of the adjectives they modify, and that scale structure also determines one of the core semantic properties of gradable adjectives: the nature of the «standard values» according to which sentences involving adjectival predications are judged to be true. In addition, we show that in the case of deverbal gradable adjectives, scalar structure can be inferred from the aspectual properties of the source verbs, providing a basis for predicting which degree modifiers will be acceptable with which participles. Centrant-nos en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables de l'anglès, com ara acquainted, mostrem que el comportament selectiu de modificadors de gradació com per exemple very i well constitueix una prova important per a la tipologia semàntica dels adjectius. Concretament, demostrem que la distribució dels modificadors de grau està estretament relacionada amb l'estructura escalar dels adjectius que modifiquen i que aquesta estructura escalar també determina una de les propietats semàntiques centrals dels adjectius graduables: la naturalesa dels «valors estàndars» d'acord amb la qual les oracions que contenen predicacions adjectivals es jutgen com a veritables. A més, mostrem que, en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables, l'estructura escalar pot inferir-se de les propietats aspectuals dels verbs originals, la qual cosa permet de predir quins modificadors de grau seran acceptables amb quins participis.

Comunicació presentada a: Sinn und Bedeutung 18 celebrat del 11 al 13 de setembre de 2013 a Vitòria, Espanya. Adverbially-interpreted temporal frequency adjectives (FAs) such as frequent, sporadic, and daily, are usually restricted to modifying event-denoting nominals (e.g. The house underwent frequent cleanings = Frequently, the house underwent cleanings vs. We saw frequent sailors/the frequent sailor 6= Frequently, we saw sailors/the sailor). In this, they contrast with what Gehrke and McNally (2012) refer to as nontemporal FAs (e.g. odd, cp. The odd sailor strolled by = A sailor strolled by on odd occasions). However, there is a systematic set of exceptions to this generalization, e.g. She wrote frequent letters, which have never been explained. In this paper we provide an analysis of these exceptional cases. Our account points to interesting parallelisms between the construction of interest and Kennedy’s (2012) use of Kratzer’s (1996) Event Identification to account for event measurement via measure expressions on incremental themes. It also situates this use of FAs within the family of semantic incorporation constructions, providing a novel example of how the varied morphosyntactic resources of a language can make it possible to fulfill the pragmatic functions that incorporation constructions serve for a wide variety of propositional contents. This work has been supported by grants FFI2010-15006, FFI2012-34170, and JCI-2010-08581 from the Spanish government, as well as an ICREA Foundation Academia award.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the IV NEREUS (http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/Nereus/) international workshop on the topic Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages, held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on October 9th and 10th, 2008.The main theme of the workshop was the relation between the semantic notion definiteness and the syntactic structure of the Determiner Phrase. Within this theme various specific topics were discussed during the workshop. One group of papers addressed the topic of definiteness and specificity: the notion of indefiniteness characteristic of object bare singular nominals in Spanish and Catalan, the interrelationship between (in)definiteness and word order, the interpretation of definite bare nouns in Romanian, the interrelationship between focus structure and nonspecificity in Spanish, definiteness and specificity in denominal verbs, and definiteness in adjective nominalizations in Spanish. Another group of papers dealt with the syntactic DP structure corresponding to different types of nominal projections in Old Romance, and the structure of vectorial bare NPs in Spanish. Finally, one paper was presented on the properties of adnominal adjectives in Romance at the morphologysemantics interface, and one on a semantic approach to the notion of differential object marking.Although some authors were not able to include their presentation in this volume (J.M. Brucart & Á. Gallego, M. García, and D. Jacob), we would like to thank all the contributors and participants at the workshop for their talks and interesting discussion.Finally, we would like to thank the institutions that contributed to the success of the workshop: Departament de Filologia Catalana. UAB; Departament de Filologia Espanyola. UAB; Departament de Lingüística. Universität Konstanz; Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge; Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Departamento de Filología. Universidad de Alcalá; Generalitat de Catalunya. AGAUR (2008ARCS100007); Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2007-31131-E); Vicerectorat d Economia. UAB

This paper fits in the context of a current movement in formal semantics to reanalyze as INTERSECTIVE most or all adjectives that have been treated as predicate modifiers in the tradition of formal semantics.

Castilian speakers learning English have a tendency to overuse the expression all the in noun phrases (NPs) in cases where every or all is required.The purpose of this paper is to suggest a strategy for teaching these expressions, within the constext of an English grammar course or a grammar unit in a higher level language course, so as to help students learn to avoid such errors.This strategy involves first clarifying the fine-grained semantics of universal expressions within English and (independently) within Castilian, and then subsequently contrasting the two systems. The approach advocated here will thus underscore, at general level, (1) the limitations of teaching these expressions in terms of simple translation equivalences, and (2) the critical contributions that can be made to language pedagogy by results in theoretical linguistic research (in this case, on NP semantics and pragmatics).

The analysis to be proposed has two notable consequences. First, it indicates that while presupposition may play a role in accounting for the so-called definiteness restriction associated with the construction, presupposition cannot account for all of the definiteness restriction facts-in fact, on the view defended here, the definiteness restriction facts cannot be explained by a single generalization. Second, it supports the view that the notions weak and strong should be redefined as suggested in Ladusaw 1994, where “weak” is essentially equated with “nonparticular-denoting”.

Comunicació presentada al 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, celebrat del 27 al 29 de març del 2015 a Burnaby, Canada. This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant FFI2013-41301, AGAUR grant 2014SGR00698, and an ICREA Academia award to the second author.

Focusing on the case of deverbal gradable adjectives such as acquainted, we show that the selective behavior of degree modifiers such as very and well provides an important prove on the semantic typology of adjectives. Specifically, we demonstrate that the distribution of degree modifiers is closely tied to the scalar structure of the adjectives they modify, and that scale structure also determines one of the core semantic properties of gradable adjectives: the nature of the «standard values» according to which sentences involving adjectival predications are judged to be true. In addition, we show that in the case of deverbal gradable adjectives, scalar structure can be inferred from the aspectual properties of the source verbs, providing a basis for predicting which degree modifiers will be acceptable with which participles. Centrant-nos en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables de l’anglès, com ara acquainted, mostrem que el comportament selectiu de modificadors de gradació com per exemple very i well constitueix una prova important per a la tipologia semàntica dels adjectius. Concretament, demostrem que la distribució dels modificadors de grau està estretament relacionada amb l’estructura escalar dels adjectius que modifiquen i que aquesta estructura escalar també determina una de les propietats semàntiques centrals dels adjectius graduables: la naturalesa dels «valors estàndars» d’acord amb la qual les oracions que contenen predicacions adjectivals es jutgen com a veritables. A més, mostrem que, en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables, l’estructura escalar pot inferir-se de les propietats aspectuals dels verbs originals, la qual cosa permet de predir quins modificadors de grau seran acceptables amb quins participis.

Distributional semantics has very successfully modeled semantic phenomena at the word level, and recently interest has grown in extending it to capture the meaning of phrases via semantic composition. We present experiments in adjective-noun composition which (1) show that adjectival modification can be successfully modeled with distributional semantics, (2) show that composition models inspired by the semantics of higher-order predication fare better than those that perform simple feature union or intersection, (3) contrary to what the theoretical literature might lead one to expect, do not yield a distinction between intensional and non-intensional modification, and (4) suggest that head noun polysemy and whether the adjective corresponds to a typical attribute of the noun are relevant factors in the distributional representation of adjective phrases. We acknowledge the support of Spanish MICINN grant FFI2010-09464-E (McNally, Boleda), the ICREA Foundation (McNally), Catalan AGAUR grant 2010BP-A00070, MICINN grant TIN2009-14715-C04-04, EU grant PASCAL2, FP7-ICT-216886, the DARPA DEFT program under AFRL grant FA8750-13-2-0026 (Boleda) and the ERC under the 2011 Starting Independent Research Grant 283554 to the COMPOSES project (Baroni, Pham). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of DARPA, AFRL or the US government.

Mereological models are often used to account for distributive reference, which arises when the denotation of a linguistic expression holds of certain parts of the plurality to which it is applied. It is general praxis in the theory of distributivity to employ structural atoms, which are entities that lack proper parts, to represent the base entities of which pluralities are formed. This thesis offers a revision of the notion of atom used in the theory of distributivity and argues in favor of employing relative atoms, which are entities that are atomic only with respect to a certain property. With relative atoms, we can account for why atomic and nonatomic parts of a plurality can equally be involved in distributive reference, in accordance with newly obtained empirical evidence. We can also capture the unexpected ways in which Hungarian reduplicated numerals and reciprocal constructions interact. Els models mereològics s’utilitzen sovint per explicar la referència distributiva, que apareix quan la denotació d’una expressió lingüística conté certes parts de la pluralitat a la qual s’aplica. El fet d’utilitzar àtoms estructurals, que són entitats sense parts pròpies, per representar les entitats bàsiques sobre les quals es formen les pluralitats és una pràctica habitual a la teoria de distributivitat. Aquesta tesi ofereix una revisió de la noció d’àtom utilitzada a la teoria de distributivitat i exposa arguments a favor de la utilització d’àtoms relatius, que són entitats atòmiques només en relació amb una propietat determinada. Gràcies als àtoms relatius podem explicar perquè les parts atòmiques i no atòmiques d’una pluralitat poden estar involucrades en la referència distributiva, segons proves empíriques obtingudes recentment. A més, podem reflectir les diferents maneres imprevistes amb què interactuen els numerals reduplicats i les construccions recíproques en hongarès.

Pragmatic enrichments arising from the use of modified fractions have been little studied, but offer interesting insights into the subtleties of scale structure and granularity. In this chapter I present some new experimental data on the interpretation of these expressions. I argue that these data suggest that modified fractions, like modified integers, give rise to pragmatic enrichments which are conditioned by scale granularity, but that we need to refine the notion of granularity somewhat to extend it to this domain. There is also evidence for enrichments that are not easily captured in classical quantity implicature terms, but which I suggest could be explained by appeal to typicality effects.

Reference via adjectives typically requires an intermediate step: nominalization through overt derivational affxing. However, many languages allow even unaffixed adjectives to be used referentially. This thesis is a case study of this use of adjectives (called adjectival determiner phrases or A-DPs) in Slovak. Based on corpus evidence, I describe their syntax and semantics. I argue that Slovak A-DPs, in contrast to derived nominalizations, have no nominal layer in their structure. The two meanings observed for A-DPs are shown to derive from the underlying character of adjectives themselves, speci cally, from the fact that the semantic representation contains two variables, one for the property denoted by the adjective and one for the bearer of that property. Additional research questions addressed in the thesis include a comparison of affix-based and affixless nominalization strategies, as well as the role and the distribution of determiners in Slovak A-DPs in light of their interaction with information structure., La referència a través dels adjectius requereix típicament un pas intermig: la nominalització a través de l'explícita a fixació derivativa. No obstant això, moltes llengües permeten l'ús referencial també dels adjectius escarits. Aquesta tesi és un estudi de cas d'aquest ús d'adjectius (anomenats A-DPs) en eslovac. Basant-me en les dades de corpus descric la seva sintaxi i semàntica. A rmo que els A-DPs en eslovac, contràriament a les nominalitzacions derivades, no contenen en la seva estructura una capa nominal. Demostro que els dos signi cats identi cats dels A-DPs estan derivats de la naturalesa dels mateixos adjectius, i específi cament del fet de que la representació semàntica conté dues variables, una per l'atribut expressat per l'adjectiu i una altra que correspon al portador d'aquest atribut. Altres qüestions que aborda aquesta tesi inclouen la comparació de l'estratègia de la nominalització amb i sense afi xos així com el paper i la distribució dels determinants en els A-DPs en eslovac a causa de la seva interacció amb l'estructura informativa.

Aquesta tesi investiga la interpretació de les frases amb el verb have en anglès. Aquest verb ha generat una gran quantitat de literatura en tots els àmbits de la lingüística, sense que s'hagi arribat a cap consens sobre com cal analitzar-lo. Dos dels motius que expliquen aquesta situació són la dificultat per determinar quin significat aporta have en tots els seus usos, i la restricció de definitud que presenta quan el seu objecte conté un nom relacional. En aquesta tesi analitzo com s'han tractat aquests dos problemes en la literatura semàntica, i proposo una nova anàlisi que qüestiona alguns supòsits de què parteix aquesta literatura: la visió transitiva dels noms relacionals, la naturalesa i l'abast de l'efecte de definitud, i una oposició simple entre sintagmes nominals indefinits i definits/quantificacionals. Així mateix, apunto una possible via per integrar en aquesta anàlisi alguns dels usos funcionals de have., This dissertation looks into the interpretation of have-sentences in English. The verb have has given rise to a great amount of literature in all the subfields of linguistics; no consensus, however, has emerged on how it should be analyzed. Two of the reasons explaining this situation are the difficulty of determining what meaning have contributes to a sentence across its uses, and the definiteness effect it shows when its object contains a relational noun. In this thesis I analyze how these two problems have been tackled in the semantic literature, and I propose a new analysis that calls into question some of the assumptions this literature is built on: the transitive view of relational nouns, the nature and the scope of the definiteness effect, and a simple opposition between `weak' and `strong' NPs. Furthermore, I point at a possible way to integrate some of the functional uses of have into this analysis.

This dissertation contains three studies, which explore various questions about verbal aspect and how it is affected by the process of nominalization. The first study examines the type of regular eventive nominalizations in Slavic and Germanic languages, which comprise verbal and resultative nouns. It is shown that the availability of these nominalization types depends on how the values of two aspectual parameters are set up in particular languages. The second study deals with English -er, and French -eur deverbal nouns, which denote external arguments. Four different types of reading are recognized for these nouns: episodic, habitual, dispositional, and occupational/instrument readings. The observed variation is accounted for by means of the notion of a stage of an individual or a kind. The last study investigates in more detail the meaning of resultative nominals. They are claimed to have a meaning which parallels that of the perfect aspect in the sentential domain. The overall conclusion is that aspect plays a significant role in the semantics of deverbal nominals., Aquesta tesi ofereix tres estudis que exploren diverses qüestions sobre l’aspecte verbal i come està afectat pel procés de nominalització. El primer estudi examina les nominalitzacions eventives regulars les llengües eslaves i germàniques, específicament els noms verbals i resultatius. Es mostra que la possibilitat d’aquests tipus de nominalitzacions depèn de com els valors de dos paràmetres aspectuals es configuren en llengües concretes. El segon estudi se centra en els noms deverbals en -er d’anglès i en -eur de francès, que denoten arguments externs. S’identifica quatre intepretacions diferents per aquests noms: episòdica, habitual, de disposició, i ocupacional / instrument. La variació observada s’explica mitjançant la noció d’estadi (stage) d’un individu o d’una classe d’individus (kind). L’últim estudi investiga amb més detall el significat dels nominals resultatius. S’argumenta que aquests nominalitzacions tenen un significat paral·lel a la de l’aspecte perfecte en el domini oracional. La conclusió global de la tesi és que aspecte juga un paper fonamental en la semàntica dels noms deverbals.

Even though it is an intuitive and perhaps obvious idea that composition leads to non-trivial semantic interactions between words, and these interactions affect the contents of predication, there has still been little work done on how verbs restrict their arguments and how flexible these restrictions are. This dissertation thus starts out with the observation that verbs have very rich combinatorial paradigms and raises the question of what this wide combinatorial capacity of verbs means for the semantics of the verb and the process of composition. Distributed in three case studies, a rich data set of the Spanish change of state verbs congelar ‘freeze’, romper ‘break’ and cortar ‘cut’ is analysed and further discussed against the background of studies from theoretical linguistics. Tackling the question of the rich combinatorial paradigm of verbs leads to taking a position on the theoretical horizon of theories of predication as well as theories of lexicon, for which I turn to Modern Type Theories and an underspecified lexical meaning, Aunque es intuitiva y quizás obvia la idea de que la composición conduce a interacciones semánticas no triviales entre las palabras que afectan al contenido de una predicación, hay todavía pocos trabajos que analicen el modo como los verbos restringen sus argumentos y examinen si sus restricciones son muy amplias o más bien limitadas. Esta tesis parte de la observación de que los verbos tienen unos paradigmas combinatorios muy ricos, para plantear la pregunta acerca del papel que desempeña la combinatoria predicado-argumento tanto en el significado de los verbos como en el proceso de construcción del significado composicional. Se llevan a cabo tres estudios de caso correspondientes a otros tantos verbos de cambio de estado, congelar, romper y cortar, en los que se presenta una rica colección de datos que se discute a la luz del conocimiento que proporcionan los estudios de lingüística teórica. Abordar la cuestión del rico paradigma de combinatoria de los verbos conduce a tomar una posición en el horizonte de las teorías de la predicación, así como también en el de las teorías del léxico. La presente tesis se decanta en este sentido por la teoría de tipos moderna (Modern Type Theory) y un significado léxico subespecificado.

In this dissertation, I deal with the problem of presupposition projection. I mostly focus on compound sentences composed of two clauses and conditional sentences in which the second clause carries a presupposition. The central claim is that the presupposition carried by the second clause projects by default, with the exception of cases in which the presupposition entails the first clause (or, in disjunctive sentences, the negation of the first clause). In the latter cases, the presupposition should not project, since it is logically stronger than the first clause (or its negation). Thus, in conjunctions, if the presupposition projected, the speaker’s assertion of the first clause would be uninformative. As for conditionals and disjunctions, if the presupposition projected, the speaker would show inconsistency in his/her beliefs by showing uncertainty about the truth value of the first clause (or its negation). I argue that, in conditionals, this uncertainty is conversationally implicated whereas, in disjunctions, it results from the context’s compatibility with the first disjunct. I maintain that, in cases where projection is blocked, the presupposition is conditionalized to the first clause (or its negation). I demonstrate that the conditionalization is motivated in a straightforward way by the pragmatic constraints on projection just described and that, contrary to what is defended by the so-called ‘satisfaction theory’, presupposition conditionalization is a phenomenon independent from local satisfaction., En esta tesis, trato el problema de la proyección de presuposiciones. Me centro mayoritariamente en oraciones compuestas de dos cláusulas y en oraciones condicionales cuya segunda cláusula contiene una presuposición. El argumento central es que la presuposición contenida en la segunda cláusula proyecta por defecto, con la excepción de casos en los que la presuposición entraña la primera cláusula (o, en las oraciones disyuntivas, la negación de la primera cláusula). En estos últimos casos, la presuposición no debería proyectar, puesto que es lógicamente más fuerte que la primera cláusula (o su negación). Por tanto, en las oraciones conjuntivas, si la presuposición proyectase, la aseveración de la primera cláusula por parte del hablante no sería informativa. En cuanto a las oraciones condicionales y disyuntivas, si la presuposición projectase, el hablante mostraría inconsistencia en sus creencias al mostrar incertidumbre acerca del valor de verdad de la primera cláusula (o su negación). Sostengo que, en oraciones condicionales, esta incertidumbre es implicada conversacionalmente mientras que, en las oraciones disyuntivas, resulta de la compatibilidad contextual de la primera cláusula. Mantengo que, en casos en los que la proyección es bloqueada, la presuposición es condicionalizada a la primera cláusula (o su negación). Demuestro que la condicionalización es motivada de manera directa por las restricciones de tipo pragmático descritas arriba y que, contrariamente a la idea defendida por la así llamada ‘teoría de la satisfacción’, la condicionalización de la presuposición es un fenómeno independiente de la satisfacción local de la misma.

En el trabajo la semántica y pragmática de formas contraídas y no-contraídas en Alemán serán discutidas. Formas contraídas son preposiciones con sufijos flexionales, obligatorias en contextos en las que el contenido descriptivo del sintagma nominal es cierto de un individual o evento (expresiones que excluyen alternativas, referentes deducibles, Situative Unika, infinitivos nominalizados, referentes no específicos). Muchos autores consideran que las formas tienen artículos definidos que fusionan con una preposición. En contrario, propongo un análisis en términos de incorporación semántica en que una preposición tiene rasgos de caso, número y género. Interpretaciones únicas provienen del número singular y del contexto. Interpretaciones no específicas provienen de la semántica y el hecho de que el argumento nominal tiene menos rango que el argumento eventivo., The semantics and pragmatics of contracted and non-contracted forms found in German will be discussed. Contracted form are prepositions with inflectional endings, and obligatory in contexts in which the descriptive content of the noun fits only one individual or event ("alternative-excluding" expressions, inferable referents, Situative Unika, nominalized infinitives, non-specific referents). Most accounts assume that contracted forms have underlying definite articles which have amalgamated with a preposition. In contrast, I propose to analyse these forms as semantically incorporating prepositions, which are inflected for (singular) number, gender, and case, and combine with noun phrases. Uniqueness effects are derived from singular number and from contextual entailments. Non-specific readings can directly be accounted for since the semantics predicts narrow scope of the nominal argument with respect to the event argument.