The definite article in Romance expletives and long weak definites
Espinal, M. Teresa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)
Cyrino, Sonia (University of Campinas. Department of Linguistics)

Date:	2017
Abstract:	This paper focuses on some issues involving expletive articles and long weak definites in Romance (mainly Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Catalan), in comparison to DPs that elicit a strong reading. We show the similarities between expletive definites and long weak definites, and we argue for an analysis in common to other polarity items in terms of polarity sensitivity. We reach the conclusion that the definite article in Romance comes in two variants: the referentially unique variant (to be translated as the semantic iota operator) and the polar variant, formally characterized with an abstract [+σ] feature, that encodes a weak bound reading (to be semantically translated by an existential operator).
Grants:	Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación FFI2014-52015-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2014-SGR-1013
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Definite articles ; Expletive articles ; Long weak definites ; Polar items ; Romance
Published in:	Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, Vol. 2 Núm. 1 (2017) , ISSN 2397-1835

DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.160

26 p, 584.4 KB

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Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Arts and Humanities > Center for Theoretical Linguistics (CLT)
Articles > Published articles