John Benjamins Publishing Company
On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality
Abstract
This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French le même (‘the same’)and addresses two main issues: a. the problem of definiteness (le même does not behave the way standard definites do); b. the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that même needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it). I propose that: a. le même is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity; b. le même is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times. This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates même to the notion of pluractionality.
Abstract
This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French le même (‘the same’)and addresses two main issues: a. the problem of definiteness (le même does not behave the way standard definites do); b. the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that même needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it). I propose that: a. le même is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity; b. le même is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times. This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates même to the notion of pluractionality.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Expressing contrast in Romanian 1
- When the benefit is on the fringe 19
- Degree fronting in Québec French and the syntactic structure of degree quantifier DPs 39
- On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality 55
- Topic prominence is not a factor of variation between Brazilian and European Portuguese 71
- When Dialectology studies contribute to lexical semantics and to Etymology 89
- Cartography and agrammatic syntactic production in Ibero-Romance 115
- The valuation of gender agreement in DP 133
- (Definite) denotation and case in Romance 149
- Compounding in Romance and English 167
- Epistemic modals in the past 185
- Floating parenthetical coordinate clauses 203
- Unfortunate questions 223
- Typology or reconstruction 239
- Sentential coordination and ellipsis 255
- Underapplication of vowel reduction to schwa in Majorcan Catalan productive derivation and verbal inflection 273
- Focus and the development of N-words in Spanish 291
- On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish 305
- Stylistic Fronting and Remnant movement in Old French 323
- Person restrictions and the representation of third person – an argument from Barceloní Catalan 343
- Definite DPs without lexical nouns in French 363
- Index 391
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Expressing contrast in Romanian 1
- When the benefit is on the fringe 19
- Degree fronting in Québec French and the syntactic structure of degree quantifier DPs 39
- On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality 55
- Topic prominence is not a factor of variation between Brazilian and European Portuguese 71
- When Dialectology studies contribute to lexical semantics and to Etymology 89
- Cartography and agrammatic syntactic production in Ibero-Romance 115
- The valuation of gender agreement in DP 133
- (Definite) denotation and case in Romance 149
- Compounding in Romance and English 167
- Epistemic modals in the past 185
- Floating parenthetical coordinate clauses 203
- Unfortunate questions 223
- Typology or reconstruction 239
- Sentential coordination and ellipsis 255
- Underapplication of vowel reduction to schwa in Majorcan Catalan productive derivation and verbal inflection 273
- Focus and the development of N-words in Spanish 291
- On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish 305
- Stylistic Fronting and Remnant movement in Old French 323
- Person restrictions and the representation of third person – an argument from Barceloní Catalan 343
- Definite DPs without lexical nouns in French 363
- Index 391
