Last update:
9 February 2010
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The Layered DPForm and meaning of French indefinites
2008. ix, 260 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 5507 5 / EUR 115.00 / USD 173.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
This book examines argumental un-NPs and du/des-NPs in French: nominals with the indefinite article and with the so-called ‘partitive article’ respectively. The main aim is to account for the different interpretations of these indefinites and to determine how interpretation and structure are related. This study thus concerns the syntax-semantics interface, with an emphasis on the composition of the left periphery and the inflectional domain of the indefinites mentioned. It is realized in the framework of generative grammar and in a cartographic approach. A crucial proposal put forward in this book is that indefinites of different semantic types are associated with different left peripheries. The analysis further suggests that the inflectional domain of these indefinites may comprise three discrete functional projections encoding the features [count], [quantity] and [number]. Interestingly, these results seem to extend to a selection of bare nouns in Romance and Germanic languages.
Table of contents
“This extremely well written monograph studies the correlation between the diverse interpretations of indefinite noun phrases and their syntactic structure or form. Ihsane argues, quite convincingly in my view, that distinct semantic interpretations are structurally dependent one on the other and that this dependency can be expressed in terms of syntactic domination. The proposed structures provide a neat solution to various problems relating to scope dependency.”
Ur Shlonsky, University of Geneva
“Ihsane applies the cartographic approach to the syntactic representation of semantic features and argues for a complex structure of what is usually considered quite mininal (such as the article un). The result may be controversial but is certainly of interest.”
“In this book, Tabea Ihsane focuses on the occurrence and distribution of French nominal phrases of the type un-NP ('a-NP') and du/des-NP ('of the-NP'). Crucially, the analyses tables on the observation that these DPs have three different readings. This leads to the core innovative proposal, which is that each interpretation of an indefinite corresponds to a distinct syntactic structure, which transparently encodes the relevant semantic properties and scope of the DP.
Subject classification |
Linguistics