Department Colloquium: The Nanosemantics of Definiteness
Time
Thursday, 10. June 2021
11:45 - 13:15
Location
online
Organizer
Department of Linguistics
Speaker:
Alexander Pfaff
Schwarz (2009) proposes that there are two kinds of definite articles associated with two aspects of definiteness: weak articles — uniqueness; strong articles — anaphora. In languages such as German, this distinction has a morphological reflex insofar as weak articles can/must contract with a preceding preposition („zum“) while the strong article must not contract („zu dem“).
In this talk, I will recast Schwarz’ analysis in a nanosyntactic framework (Starke 2010; Caha 2009) showing how the intuition that the strong article contains the weak article, both morphologically and semantically, can be formalized. I will furthermore discuss some implications that Nanosyntax (and nonlexicalist approaches in general) has for semantic compositionality (e.g. mismatches between semantic denotations and morphosyntactic constituents, denotations of head sequences).
Abstract