Something Out of Nothing: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Implicit Quantification

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-43148-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 38, 174 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 412 g

Reihe: Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

Some sentences contain no overt quantifier, yet are interpreted quantificationally, e.g., Plumbers are available (entailing that some plumbers are available), or Plumbers are intelligent (whose entailment is less clear, but seems to be saying that a large number of plumbers are intelligent). Where does the quantifier come from? In this book, Ariel Cohen makes the novel proposal that the quantifier is not simply an empty category, but is generated by reinterpretations mechanisms, which are governed by well specified principles. He demonstrates how the puzzling and sometimes mysterious properties of such sentences can be naturally derived from the reinterpretation mechanisms that generate them. The resulting picture has substantial implications that language contains hidden elements, underlying its surface structure.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cohen, Ariel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 What You See Is Not Always What You Get

2 Reinterpretation Mechanisms

1 Reinterpretation

2 Type-Shifting

3 Predicate transfer

3 Bare Plurals

1 The Ambiguity of Bare Plurals

2 A Non-quantificational Theory?

3 Quantificational Accounts of English Bare Plurals

4 Kinds or Properties?

5 A Synthesis

6 Deciding between the Theories

4 Beyond English Bare Plurals

1 Italian Bare Plurals: Direct Kind Predication

2 Definites and Type-Shifting

3 Italian BP s: Existential Readings

4 Italian BP s: Characterizing Generics

5 An Account of Italian BP s

6 Hungarian Bare Plurals

7 Bare Singulars

8 Conclusion

5 Generics and Habituals

1 Generics and Scope

2 Habituals and Scope

3 Types of Explanation

4 Reinterpretation Mechanisms Revisited

5 The Generic Quantifier

6 Generics

7 Habituals

6 Iterativity

1 Durative Adverbials

2 The Origins of Iterativity

3 Iterativity and Scope

4 Alternative Explanations

5 Iterativity as a Quantifier

7 The Nature of Implicit Quantification

1 Two Implicit Quantifiers

2 A Preference for Inference

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D. (1996), Carnegie-Mellon University, is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He has published extensively on semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. His is the author of Think Generic, CSLI Publications (1999).