Denis Delfitto

BARE PLURALS AND THE NUMBER AFFIX IN DP

morphological representation to which it is associated. In languages in which the process of plural formation corresponds to an incorporation process, irregulär nouns are arguabiy analyzed in the same way. This entails that irregulär plurals receive different interpretations in different languages: children is associated to (i) in English (the noun is selected by a zero affix), whereas chevawc is associated to (ii) in French (no number affix is present): (i) [ [ children] + NUM ]

Person Features and Pronominal Anaphora

This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaphoric usage of first person indexicals (pronoun shifting) and logophoric pronouns. The results include proposals on the connection between the semantics of first person and the syntax of the left periphery, a neo-Davidsonian treatment of the semantics of first person indexicals, and a novel view of pronominal anaphora according to which Higginbothams (1983) asymmetric relation of linking involves a mechanism of -role inheritance tied to the semantics of first person.

New views on reflexivity: Delay effects in Romance

Abstract In this contribution, we intend to offer an interesting exemplification of the kind of positive interaction that may arise between acquisition studies and linguistic theory. Starting from a full range of comparative studies showing the presence of a delay in the acquisition of the interpretive properties of non-reflexive pronominals and the absence of such a delay in languages where clitic pronominals are involved, we argue that this range of effects is elegantly derived from a general constraint on extra-lexical operations of valency-reduction, turning relations into one-place predicates. This analysis leads to a sort of cross-modular (re)interpretation of Principle B of Binding Theory and to a radically new analysis of the relation between (semantic) binding and coreference. Another important consequence of the proposed analysis is that it supports the view of Romance clitics as morphosyntactically encoding a lexical operation of reflexivization. In the second part of this article, we show that this analysis explains some intriguing and so far poorly understood asymmetries between reflexive and non-reflexive clitics arising within the domain of complex predicate constructions in Romance.

Compounds don't come easy

In this article we present an original analysis of NN compounds in Germanic and Romance, proposing that their morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties can be explained in compliance with narrow syntax conditions on Merge and Projection, crucially related to Kayne’s Antisymmetry model. In particular, we contend that root compounding represents a specific mode of syntactic computation (‘Compound Phase’), whereby two structurally identical syntactic objects – the compound members – get merged in a parallel fashion, hence yielding a symmetric configuration that prevents label projection. Compound Phase computation can thus be seen as a ‘repair strategy’ allowing the derivation to get a label and converge at the interfaces. On these theoretical grounds, the formal and interpretive contrasts between Germanic and Romance, and, within each language, the differences between compounds and prototypical syntactic constructions are essentially derived from the syntax of Compound Phases, given the independent properties of the lexical items involved in the computation.

Inflectional morphology: evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualis...

Immunity to Error through Misidentification and (Direct and Indirect) Experience Reports

In this contribution, we address the issues concerning the semantic value of Wittgenstein’s subject “I”, as in (i) “I have a toothache”, resulting from the use of predicates that involve first-person knowledge of the mental states to which they refer. As is well-known, these contexts give rise to the phenomenon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM): the utterer of (i) cannot be mistaken as to whether he is the person having a toothache. We provide a series of arguments in favor of a principled distinction between a de facto IEM, grounded in perceptual and proprioceptive judgments, and a de iure IEM, grounded in experience reports whereby the experience wears the experiencer on its sleeve. From this perspective, the no-referent account of subject “I” advocated by Wittgenstein/Anscombe is correct. In fact, we show how this analysis can be made compatible with a Kaplanian account of first-person indexicals, by identifying the speaker in the context of utterance with the person who has access to the reported private experience.

Negation as a window on the non-sequential nature of language interpretation and processing

In this contribution, it is argued that the optionally realized instances of sentential negation that correspond to so-called ‘expletive’ negation in comparative and temporal clauses of Italian are essentially the same instances of ‘covert’ negation that license Free Choice ANY in English according to the theoretical framework on negation developed in Collins & Postal 2015, in which a NEG-raising analysis in terms of movement is revived, based on the presence of many covert types of negation. Expletive negation is thus in reality a logically-driven negation head, which can be optionally realized phonologically. Its special status is confirmed by the observation that, in Italian, it scopally interacts with other negative elements by giving rise not to the expected negative concord readings but to completely unexpected double negation readings. The non-sequential interpretation of negation discussed here confirms and extends a number of recent findings around non-sequential negation processing.

Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties:

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

Where syntax meets pragmatics: varieties of de se and control structures

Abstract In this contribution, we offer an original analysis of the relation between control structures, de se readings and Immunity to Error through Misidentification. We propose that control structures are the result of an operation of Thematic Overwriting (TO), which conflates two thematic roles into one and delivers a logical representation whereby two properties are predicated of a unique argument. The account we propose explains a number of facts concerning control structures: (i) The fact that control structures are bound to the expression of de se attitudes; (ii) that fact that some control structures – more precisely, those control structures involving an Experiencer subject – are bound to the expression of implicit de se attitudes, that is, de se propositional attitudes that are immune to error through misidentification; (iii) the contrast between optional and non-optional control; (iv) the contrast between partial and exhaustive control. The account we propose also predicts a diachronic constraint on the emergence of control structures, whereby TO first emerges in the context of implicit de se attitudes and only later is extended to other de se contexts. This prediction is supported by the attested development of control structures from Old English (OE) through early Modern English (ENE) and Middle English (ME) to Modern English.

The semantics of person and de se effects in free indirect discourse

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of interpretation in FID, the factors that account for the observation that person and tense behave similarly in FID. At the same time, we will also discuss the main controversies to which the ongoing debate on FID has given rise in the literature, showing that Schlenker (Mind Lang 19(3):279–304, 2004)’s distinction between a Context of Thought (CT) and a Context of Utterance (CU) still provides a fundamentally valid insight into the nature of FID, in spite of many qualifications that are necessary and some well-motivated criticism. However, our main task here is more ambitious than simply taking a stand on the many unsettled controversies surrounding FID. In fact, we claim that Schlenker’s split between CU and CT can be derived in a principled way from the inner nature of FID as a linguistic process of ‘phenomenal identification’, whereby a Higher Experiencer attempts at reproducing (at a distinct time) the phenomenal experience proper to a Lower Experiencer. This distinction between qualitatively identified but numerically distinct experiences provides the conceptual basis for the derivation of virtually all remarkable properties of FID (including its somehow intermediate status between Direct and Indirect Discourse), while connecting, at the same time, with some intriguing semantic properties of first-person pronouns, such as the different varieties of de se readings.