Bare PPs and the syntax-semantics interface
The case of sin + bare nominal structures in Spanish
Spanish prepositional phrases headed by sin “without” with a bare noun complement (una habitación sin luz “a room without light”; un hombre sin corbata “a man without tie”) show interesting gradability properties: Degree modification is allowed if the N complement is a mass noun (una habitación muy sin luz “lit. a room very without light”; *un hombre muy sin corbata “lit. a man very without tie”). We claim that sin-PPs (sin-Preposition Phrases) hare syntactic and semantic properties with constructions involving light verbs that select for bare nouns. We argue that (a) a property-denoting bare NP pseudo-incorporates into a null verb have that is part of the syntactic-semantic structure of sin, and that (b) sin-PPs can be coerced into gradable properties as long as the bare noun is cumulative and homogeneous (divisive). Our proposal explains the differences between sin-(bare)-PPs and PPs headed by sin with a QP/DP complement, since in the latter there is neither coercion nor pseudo-incorporation.
References (23)
Borthen, Kaja. 2003. Norwegian Bare Singulars. Ph.D. dissertation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Bosque, Ignacio. 1980. “La preposición sin
”. Lingüística Hispánica 3.71–85.
Chung, Sandra & William A. Ladusaw. 2004. Restriction and saturation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The Syntax of Adjectives: A Comprehensive Study. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Dayal, Veneeta. 2011. “Hindi pseudoincorporation”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29:1.123–167.
Emonds, Joseph E. 1985. A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories. Dordrecht: Foris.
Espinal, M. Teresa & Louise McNally. 2011. “Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan”. Journal of Linguistics 47.87–128.
Etxeberria, Urtzi. 2005. Quantification and domain restriction in Basque. Ph.D. dissertation, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.
Grønn, Atle, Bert Le Bruyn, Henriëtte de Swart & Joost Zwarts. 2010. “Bare PPs across languages”. Ms., Utrecht University.
Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier. 2003. La semántica de los indefinidos. Madrid: Visor Libros.
Kayne, Richard S. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kennedy, Christopher. 2007. “Vagueness and Grammar: The Semantics of Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives”. Linguistics and Philosophy 30:1.1–45.
Kennedy, Christopher & Louise McNally. 2005. “Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates”. Language 81.345–381.
Krifka, Manfred. 1986. Nominalreferenz und Zeitkonstitution. Zur Semantik von Massentermen, Individualtermen und Aspektklassen. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität München.
Lawers, Peter & Dominique Willems. 2011. “Coercion: Definition and challenges, current approaches, and new trends”. Linguistics 49:6.1219–1235.
Le Bruyn, Bert, Henriëtte de Swart & Joost Zwarts. 2011. “Mass-count distinctions in bare PPs”. Ms., Utrecht University.
Oltra-Massuet, Isabel & Isabel Pérez-Jiménez. 2011. “La interacción contabilidad-gradabilidad en los SSPP escuetos”. Cuadernos de la ALFAL 3.138–158.
Rett, Jessica. 2008. Degree Modification in Natural Language. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University.
Rothstein, Susan. 2010. “Counting and the mass/count distinction”. Journal of Semantics 27:3.343–397.
Svenonius, Peter, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke & Tarald Taraldsen, eds. 2009. Nordlyd 36:1. Special issue on Nanosyntax. Tromsø: Septentrio Press.
van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1996. Semantic Incorporation and indefinite descriptions: Semantic and syntactic aspects of West Greenlandic noun incorporation. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Tübingen.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Kiss, Katalin É.
2023.
Definiteness Effect in the PP.
Linguistic Inquiry 54:3
► pp. 625 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.