It is argued that the English bare plural (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the generic use of the bare plural (as in Dogs bark) and its existential or indefinite plural use (as in He threw oranges at Alice). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted (...) for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a. (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed.

This chapter makes the following main claims about Hungarian: A. There is a detailed parallelism between the structures of noun phrases (DPs) and clauses (CPs), involving inflection, possessor extraction, and articles as complementizers. B. "HAVE sentences" are existential sentences involving possessor extraction. C. The argument frame of complex event nominals is identical to that of the underlying verb. D. The deverbal affix in nominals may have either a plain verb or a complex verb in its scope.

This thesis proposes that the typological distinctions among languages with respect to the formation of wh-questions can be attributed to the availability of question particles and the properties of wh-words. It is argued that the availability of question particles correlates with the lack of syntactic wh-movement. A theory of Clausal Typing is proposed to account for this correlation. In particular, languages employ either question particles or syntactic wh-movement to type a clause as a wh-question. It is shown that the Principle (...) of Economy of Derivation predicts that no language has the option of alternating between the two methods of Clausal Typing and thus there are no languages with "optional movement" of wh-words and movement of one wh-word is sufficient to type a clause as a wh-question. Apparent counterexamples to the proposal are discussed. It is argued that in languages with apparent optional fronting of wh-words , sentences with a clause-initial wh-word are clefts. In addition, it is shown that in languages which front multiple wh-words in multiple questions, the wh-words are morphologically complex and need to satisfy a licensing requirement independent of Clausal Typing. ;The internal structure of wh-words in an "in-situ" language, namely Mandarin Chinese is also examined. It is shown that wh-words in Mandarin are indefinite NPs, which lacks quantificational force, and they are polarity sensitive. In addition, Two LF operations are discusssed: Quantifier Raising and LF wh-movement. It is shown that the lack of scope ambiguities in Mandarin can be attributed to lexical properties of indefinite NPs. Arguments for and against LF wh-movement as well as the landing site of wh-words at LF are examined. It is shown that evidence against LF wh-movement does not hold and arguments against adjunction of wh-words to IP at LF will be provided. (shrink)