Predication over aspects of human individuals
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Ljudmila Geist
Abstract
Predicate nouns in German, as well as in other languages, may occur bare or with an indefinite article. This alternation is possible with role nouns, which refer to well-established aspects of individuals such as professions and nationalities. Bare NPs differ from indefinite NPs in that they have restricted meaning, are number neutral and are restricted in modifiability. In the literature, these peculiarities received different explanations. The new account combines previous analyses and is based on the following assumptions: the noun that projects an indefinite NP denotes a kind, while the noun projecting a bare NP denotes a capacity. This difference corresponds to the difference in predication: indefinite NPs predicate about the whole individual assigning it membership in a certain kind, while bare NPs predicate only about one social aspect of the individual, identifying it with a certain capacity. Since bare predication concerns only one aspect of the individual, it is partial. Bare predication can now be considered under a broader view of partial predication, a phenomenon very common in argument alternations, and can be analyzed with the tools that have proved effective in this domain. The approach to bare predication taken here thus has a larger empirical coverage.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the German Science Foundation (Project B8 Alternations and Binding in the SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context), support that I gratefully acknowledge. I would like to thank Maria Aloni, Klaus von Heusinger, Uwe Junghanns, Guido Mensching, Svetlana Petrova, Cecilia Poletto, Sarah Zobel and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. A special thank goes to Daniel Hole and Sebastian Bücking for fruitful discussions of the paper at different stages of its development.
Appendix: Predicational sentences with BNPs
Comments:
I assume that the [5]copula sein ‘be’ belongs to the class of stative verbs such as know, weigh, own and resemble, which are distinct from state verbs like sit, stand, lie, wait and sleep (cf. Maienborn 2010 for the two classes of nondynamic verbs) and denote inherently generic and stable abstract states.
The variable for aspects a is bound by existential closure. This is parallel to the way Carlson treats predication over stages of individuals: in his analysis, an existential quantifier over stages is introduced within the predicate.
To arrive at the denotation of θSOC’, Davidsonian Predicate Modification is employed.
Data Sources
Cosmas (corpus of German) http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/
[Cosmas FAZ 13/OKT]: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 08.10.2013
[Cosmas U12/FEB]: Süddeutsche Zeitung 27.02.2012
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- Frontmatter
- West Caucasian relative pronouns as resumptives
- General knowledge as an evidential category
- Predication over aspects of human individuals
- Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content
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- Erratum
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- West Caucasian relative pronouns as resumptives
- General knowledge as an evidential category
- Predication over aspects of human individuals
- Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content
- Quantifying geographical variation in acceptability judgments in regional American English dialect syntax
- The areal typology of western Middle and South America: Towards a comprehensive view
- Erratum
- Erratum to: Japanese subject markers in linguistic change: A quantitative analysis of data spanning 90 years and its theoretical implications
