Lucia M. Tovena

Pluractionality and the unity of the event

This paper exposes shortcomings of an analysis to single-event plural verbs (Cusics event-internal pluractionals) based on temporal discontinuity. It shows how to ground discontinuity on the participant used to measure out the event, by forcing breaches in the property of Mappingto-SubObject that its theta role should have. This provides an explanation for why phases cannot be described by the same predicate applying to the whole event, which in turn exposes differences with respect to semelfactive verbs and the minimal units they are made of.

On the distributive nature of adverbial quan in Mandarin Chinese

The Chinese adverbial quan is analysed as an event predicate modifier that can force a distributive reading on a sentence by targetting a nominal that expresses a plural participant in the event, and encapsulating the distributive function in the \(\theta \)-role associated with such a participant. This solution enables us to model the speakers’ intuition of an ‘overall evaluation’ associated with quan.

Scenarios of Equivalence: The Case of Quelque

The French existential determiner quelque is examined in relation to the notion of equivalence. This notion, formalised as Equity in Jayez and Tovena (Evidentiality and determination. In: Gronn A (ed) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, pp 271–286, 2008) is the explicit characterisation of a widespread intuition concerning free choice and epistemic items, according to which members of a set are presented as equivalent with respect to some relevant criterion or dimension. Equivalence is a unifying notion that enables us to embrace the different aspects of the distribution of quelque and turn them into a coherent whole.The paper discusses the epistemic component of quelque and draws attention to its evidential property, which is exploited in accounting for the subtle interplay between the determiner and the types of nouns it combines with. It is then argued that the seeming positive polarity of quelque derives from the conventionalised effect of a processing interaction between its existential quantifier status and the epistemic implicature it conveys. By taking into account the pressure of processing mechanisms on the stabilisation of use, we are able to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that several epistemic determiners with unrelated morphology in different languages exhibit a converging behaviour with respect to negation. Finally, a closer look at diachronic data reveals that the anti-specificity of quelque is present already in the early stages of the life of the item.

Negative Quantification and Existential Sentences

This paper gives an insight into a productive type of construction in Italian that can be broadly characterised by the absence of verb, the presence of an initial n-word—from a surfacy point of view, and is interpreted as a full sentence, more precisely as a negative existential sentence. It is proposed that the sentential interpretation is possible because the negative expression requires tripartite structure at some abstract level of representation. The negated existential type of sentence is linked to the intersective relation imposed by the n-word and the constraint of empty intersection. The use of different n-words is interpreted as an overt marking of different perspectives on the situation described and result in different ways of satisfying conservativity.