Arguments in Spanish are not uniformly DPs
Samuel Jambrović
September 2023
 

In many Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish, unmodified nouns can appear without a determiner in postverbal but not preverbal position (Suñer 1982, Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994, Chierchia 1998). It has been claimed that such arguments are introduced by a phonologically null determiner that must be lexically governed, or c-commanded by a lexical head like V or P (Contreras 1986, Longobardi 1994). Two aspects of Spanish present issues for this analysis, neither of which has been addressed in the literature on bare nouns: proper names do not undergo N-to-D raising, and the plural form of the indefinite article (unos/unas ‘some’) seems to be exempt from Chierchia’s (1998) Blocking Principle. In this paper, I pursue a different approach to the distribution of bare nouns in Spanish, one where the position of the verb establishes the domain of existential closure, following Benedicto (1998), and where mass versus count behavior results from the absence or presence of NumP in the structure, following Borer (2005a). I propose that certain indefinite determiners presuppose a cardinality of one on the NumP that they select and show that definite determiners give rise to a systematic ambiguity between mass and count interpretation. For example, el pato ‘the duck’ could denote an atomic individual or a totality of duck “stuff” in a given context. I attribute the ambiguity of el pato to the lack of NumP in its structure and to the semantics of the maximality operator, a component of all definite determiners.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007452
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
keywords: bare nouns, existential closure, spanish, mass nouns, count nouns, plurality, singularity, definiteness, maximality, kinds, predicates, arguments, type-shifting, lexical government, n-to-d movement, blocking principle, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v1 [July 2023]
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