Longobardi

GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI
H O W C O M PA R AT I V E I S S E M A N T I C S ? A U N I F I E D PA R A M E T R I C T H E O RY O F B A R E N O U N S AND PROPER NAMES*
One of the two central suggestions put forth in Longobardi (1991, 1994) was that Romance/English differences in the syntax of proper names were parametrically connected to supposed differences in the semantics of bare (plural and mass) common nouns (BNs). The present article will pursue this line of investigation, trying to make precise such meaning differences and to understand the reason for their apparently surprising parametric association with the syntax of proper names. It will be shown that in most Romance varieties BNs, unlike their English counterparts, distribute their existential and generic readings across all different contexts exactly like (Romance and English) overt indefinites. All the differences will be unified under the proposal that Romance BNs are nothing but a type of indefinites (variables, existentially or generically bound) in Kamp-Heims DRT sense, while English BNs are rather systematically ambiguous between this quantificational interpretation and a referential (i.e. directly kind-denoting, much in the spirit of Carlson 1977a, b) one, providing for another type of generic reading. The analysis will therefore crucially exploit and empirically support Gerstner and Krifkas (1987) distinction between referential and quantificational genericity. On such grounds we will finally gain a conceptual understanding of the typological implication originally established in Longobardi (1991, 1994), thus confirming that the strategies of interpretation of nominals, whether proper or common nouns, are basically one and the same, though differently parametrized in different languages. This result, in turn, will shed some light on the question whether comparative semantics is possible and whether it can be singled out as a legitimate independent component of parametric theories of grammatical variation.
1.
I N T R O D U C T I O N : VA R I AT I O N I N S Y N TA X I N T E R P R E TAT I O N
AND
At least two developments have characterized the progress of general linguistic theory for the last two decades: the emergence of the formal study of the syntax-semantics mapping and that of Principles&Parameters theories of grammatical variation, the latter perhaps the main achievement of the linguistic sciences after and along with the historical-comparative method. Grammatical variation (to be roughly understood as the overall linguistic diversity once we subtract Saussurean lexical arbitrariness) as investigated for the morphosyntactic components in parametric theories is supposed to be:
* I am indebted to C. Boeckx for providing me with some bibliographical material and to G. Carlson, G. Chierchia, D. Delfitto, and an anonymous referee for discussion or comments on previous drafts of this paper. Natural Language Semantics 9: 335369, 2001. 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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(1) a. finite b. discrete c. limited (with respect to the number of actual phenomenic points of contrast exhibited by surface variation across languages) In other words, there is assumed to be a finite set of parameters, each with a finite number of predefined values (in principle two), and under each parameter cluster together several surface differences. Now, in the light of the parallel development of theories of the mapping between syntax and semantics at least three questions arise naturally: (2) a. Does variation exist in the semantic component? b. Does it display the classical parametric properties mentioned above? c. Is it always/sometimes independent of morphosyntactic variation? Questions of a similar sort have been put on the research agenda most forcefully by Chierchia (1996). In short, one may ask whether comparative semantics is possible, which form it may take, and how independent it is of (comparative) syntax. The optimal case in point to investigate such problems should be provided, in principle, by instances of syntactic homonymy across languages; by this term let me understand cases in which what appears as roughly the same surface syntactic shape clearly corresponds to distinct logical representations in different languages. An ideal testing ground in this sense is the syntax-semantics mapping of determinerless nominals, for the combination of two reasons: the interpretation of such nominals has been a major focus of inquiry since (and thanks to) Carlsons (1977a, b) groundbreaking work and, at the same time, a good deal of comparative material has more recently been brought to light, especially in the Romance-Germanic domain. While many Germanic and Romance languages, in particular English and Italian, hardly display obvious structural contrasts in the process of interpretation of overtly determined argument nominals (e.g. every man, the man, a man, two men, . . . and their literal correspondents), the situation is much more intriguing and problematic in the case of overtly determinerless nominals. In fact, while one of the two main types of argument determinerless nominals, proper names, seems to display a crosslinguistic constant semantics, but a variable syntax, quite the opposite is likely to be the case for the other type, namely bare (mass/plural) common nouns (henceforth BNs). In this article I will try to provide some preliminary answers to the general questions above, analyzing the relation between the syntax and the semantics of precisely these two types of entities.
HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?
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2.
BARE NOUNS
AND
PROPER NAMES
In the Romance and Germanic languages, nouns may normally occur in singular or plural form and, if morphologically singular, are subject to either a mass or a count interpretation. In most of these languages these three types of head nouns may all occur superficially determinerless (not overtly introduced by any member of a class of mutually exclusive items called determiners: usually a definite or indefinite article, a quantifier, or a demonstrative) in argument function, but according to their semantic behavior within argument phrases they seem to fall into two pretheoretically well distinguishable classes, exemplified in (3) and (4) below, respectively:1 1) determinerless arguments with singular non-mass interpreted head nouns appear to denote a definite (roughly, unique in the domain of discourse), specific (i.e. particular) entity, tend to be rigid designators in Kripkes (1980) sense, and to always assume the widest possible scope (no logical operator or intensional context may take them within its scope); 2) determinerless arguments with mass or plural head nouns never denote a definite specific entity and in certain instances cannot assume scope over any logical operator (Carlson 1977a, b): (3) Ho incontrato Maria. I met Maria.
(4) a. Bevo sempre vino. I always drink wine. b. Ho mangiato patate. I ate potatoes. The set of head nouns entering the first type of argument is essentially lexically defined (though in a non-trivial way; cf. Longobardi 1996) and is roughly coextensive with the traditional class of proper names; the second type may virtually concern all nouns, including in particular traditional common nouns. Assuming Carlsons (1977a) ontological partition of individual entities into objects and kinds, let us suppose that the head nouns entering type (1) phrases are by themselves, i.e. as part of their lexical meaning, object-
For present purposes I will class among determiners also cardinals and certain quantity expressions, such as molto much, poco little, or abbastanza enough. For subtler distributional distinctions among determiners cf. Szabolcsi (1994), Longobardi (2000b). Note that throughout the paper, English translations of the Italian examples are often word-by-word glosses, thus occasionally ungrammatical or infelicitous.
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naming items (thus, are capable of referring to objects), whereas those only entering type (2) phrases are kind-naming items. I will say, further, that all nominal arguments (i.e. potentially phrasal constituents, not just heads) denote entities taken, in principle, from the Carlsonian ontology presupposed by natural language, therefore again objects and kinds; I will furthermore assume that, essentially by virtual conceptual necessity, they may be of two types: quantificational and referential. Quantificational arguments denote via the intervention of a variable, while the referential ones denote as constants just on the grounds of the lexical referring potential of the noun. The kind-naming meaning typical of common nouns will be taken as always able to provide a predicate used in the restrictor of a variable, while the object-naming meaning of proper names cannot do so, except under special selective conditions (cf. Longobardi, forthcoming, for some discussion). Thus, nominal arguments formed by an overt determiner and a common noun will be said to denote objects through an essentially quantificational structure, in which the lexically kind-naming meaning of the head noun is used as a predicative restriction (expressing membership in the extension of the kind) for the variable bound by the determiner (its selective operator; cf. Longobardi 1994). In the case of determinerless proper names (type (1)), on the contrary, the object-denoting effect of the argument will be regarded as a direct consequence of the lexical object-naming nature of the noun itself: therefore the nominal argument as a whole will be a(n) (object)-referential expression. If so, determined common nouns and determinerless proper names represent the two extreme or pure cases of variable (quantificational) and constant (referential) interpretation for an argument. Much of the following discussion will address the problem of how, instead, determinerless arguments formed on mass/plural nouns (the subtypes of (2)) behave within this system. Notice, first of all, that these two subtypes behave alike from essentially all relevant viewpoints, except precisely for the mass/plural distinction; this is why I will systematically refer to them under the collective term bare nouns (BNs).2
2 It is in fact hardly felicitous to talk about the relevant properties of these items by referring to them just as bare plurals, as has often been the case in the literature, precisely because this obscures the fact that plurals and mass nouns behave alike in all important respects (on this point also cf. Chierchia 1996; Carlson 1999). For the whole question see Delfitto (to appear). The term bare nouns, used in the intended sense (i.e., excluding bare count singulars), is meant to suggest that plurals and mass terms form a crosslinguistic natural class, parametrically well distinguished from bare singulars, though perhaps subject to the same general interpretive conditions, along lines discussed in some more detail in Crisma (1997, 1999).
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While determinerless proper names instantiate quite different surface structures in English and Romance, BNs can be shown to essentially display the same superficial syntax in the two language types (cf. Longobardi 1994 and Section 5 below). 3. ROMANCE BARE NOUNS
AS
INDEFINITES
3.1. The Two Readings As in all West European languages, BNs in Romance are subject to just two fundamental types of interpretation: the existential one (henceforth Ex) and the generic one3 (henceforth symbolized as Gen, to be taken as a mere epiphenomenal label for very different types of genericity4). Three descriptive proposals have so far been made as to the interpretation of Italian BNs (some other Romance languages, perhaps all except for Portuguese, appear to be at best equally restrictive; therefore, as a working hypothesis, I will tentatively use Romance throughout the paper as referring to the whole family, with the important proviso that we already know there to be exceptions, at least in some Portuguese varieties: cf. e.g. Munn and Schmitt 1999a, b):5 Casalegno (1987): only Ex, unlike English Longobardi (1994): Ex, sometimes Gen (but only with I(ndividual)-level predicates, thus with a distribution unlike the English one) Chierchia (1996): Ex, Gen, distributed essentially as in English
In this work it will be shown that, taken literally, all these proposals are
For the hardly definable semantics of such readings cf. the various essays collected in and referred to in Carlson and Pelletier (1995). Here we take generic lato sensu to also cover the readings identified by Condoravdi (1994) and termed functional. 4 One of the aims of the present research is precisely that of contributing to tell apart the various sources of genericity in Romance and Germanic, which until very recently have too often been gathered under a single heterogeneous and spurious category, rather reminiscent of other temporary entities in the history of the field, e.g. Proto-Indoeuropean /a/ before Brugmann and Saussure or, perhaps, autonomous phonemic representations. 5 Also cf. Dobrovie-Sorin and Laca (1996) and Benedicto (1997) for some recent discussion. I will analyze the interpretation of Romance BNs as methodologically independent of the peculiar constraints on their distribution, which are rather widely discussed in the literature (e.g. cf. Contreras 1986; Delfitto and Schroten 1992) and can anyway be circumvented by adding some adjectival or relative modification to the BN. For the syntax of Romance BNs cf. also Lois (1986), Torrego (1989), Longobardi (1994), among others.
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inadequate; it will be argued, instead, for the following descriptive generalizations: (5) a. The distribution of the interpretations of Italian BNs = that of Italian overt indefinites = that of English overt indefinites in the same environments. b. The distribution of the interpretations of Italian BNs that of English BNs. c. Italian BNs (unlike English BNs) are generic only in independent quantificational environments. d. It is Italian overt definites that can be generic in all (pragmatically appropriate) environments, like English BNs. In the next three sections I consider the distribution of the two readings for BNs with the main potentially relevant types of predicates (all the following paradigms abstract away from the subkind or taxonomic reading6). 3.2. S(tage)-Level Predicates With a S(tage)-level predicate there are three main subcases to consider: a) episodic sentences; b) characterizing sentences (in the sense of Carlson and Pelletier 1995, i.e. gnomic); c) episodic sentences with a generalizing adverb. (6) a. Elefanti di colore bianco hanno creato in passato grande curiosit. Ex White-colored elephants raised a lot of curiosity in the past. b. Elefanti di colore bianco possono creare grande curiosit. Gen/?Ex White-colored elephants may raise a lot of curiosity. c. Elefanti di colore bianco hanno creato sempre/spesso in passato grande curiosit. Gen/?Ex White-colored elephants always/often raised a lot of curiosity in the past. As can seen, the generic reading of a subject BN with S-level predicates is possible (pace Casalegno 1987 and Longobardi 1994), but appears to
6 Following Carlson and Pelletier (1995: Introduction), by taxonomic I refer to readings where the denotation of the nominal ranges over kinds (subkinds) rather than objects, as e.g. in Many prehistoric animals have become extinct.
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depend on the presence of a DP-external operator of generality, such as the habitual verbal aspect responsible for the characterizing meaning of (6b) or a quantificational adverb (presumably binding the subject la Lewis 1975) as in (6c). In a way, the subjects of such predicates seem to acquire genericity through generalization from an indefinite series of singular events. 3.3. I(ndividual)-Level Predicates I-level predicates are supposed to be always characterizing by their lexical meaning (cf. Carlson and Pelletier 1995: Introduction, and especially Chierchia 1995); thus a subject BN should normally be able to be Gen and only Gen. This appears correct: (7) Cani da guardia di grosse dimensioni sono pi efficienti. Gen Watch dogs of large size are more efficient.
On such grounds, Chierchia (1995) suggested that genericity here is the direct product of a lexical property of I-level predicates. However, serious doubts can be cast on this idea, for the situation is more complicated: first, as was the case in (6a) above, the availability of the generic reading becomes much more degraded as soon as the present (habitual) tense of (7) is replaced by a tense implying an episodic interpretation; therefore, the presence of a characterizing (habitual) aspect appears to be crucial to license genericity with I-level predicates as well. Second, I-level predicates are at least split in two with respect to such phenomena (all judgments through (10) are given w.r.t. Gen, since the Ex readings are awkward anyway: (8) a. Stati di grandi dimensioni sono pericolosi. States of large size are dangerous.
b.??Stati di grandi dimensioni sono prosperi. States of large size are prosperous. (9) a. Cani da guardia di grosse dimensioni sono pi efficient/ aggressivi. Watchdogs of large size are more efficient/aggressive.
b.??Cani da guardia di grosse dimensioni sono pi pelosi/neri. Watchdogs of large size are more hairy/black. (10) a. Uccelli di zone paludose sono ghiotti di insetti. Birds from marshy areas are greedy for insects.
b.??Uccelli di zone paludose sono scuri/intelligenti. Birds from marshy areas are dark/intelligent.
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Let us call the two subclasses A and B, respectively. What is the rationale for this split in the class of I-level predicates? A tentative conjecture is the following: notice that class A predicates are somewhat more eventive than those of class B, which are more stative: if so, we may hypothesize that the present tense here instantiates a formal super-category of durational or imperfective aspect, superficially neutralizing the semantic distinction eventive/stative; but only the imperfective aspect associated with an eventive aktionsart would count as habitual. Thus, the latter aspect would never be selected by stative class B predicates; but only an habitual aspect, the one semantically selected just by class A, would provide a real generic operator. If so, even bare subjects of I-level predicates would acquire genericity through generalization from singular events.7 Not surprisingly, an explicit adverb of generality like usually can restore full acceptability of Gen in all the (b) examples. Therefore it is likely that the factors licensing the generic reading of BNs with S-level and I-level predicates are just the same (an aspectual operator of habituality, essentially as suggested by Delfitto 1997, or an adverb of generality) and have actually nothing to do with the distinction between these two predicate types. 8 To apply a test suggested in Carlson and Pelletier (1995: Introduction), note further that in all cases considered the generic flavor seems a property of the sentence, not of the subject DP, in other respects as well: for it is retained even if the BN is replaced by a definite specific singular or a proper name, which are certainly object- and not kind-denoting expressions. The descriptive discoveries made so far about the readings of BN subjects in the context of the various predicates can be summed up, for just practical purposes, as follows: (11) S-level I-level a. episodic b. characterizing (habitual aspect) Ex Ex/Gen
c. lexically characterizing A (habitual aspect) Gen d. lexically characterizing B (non-habitual aspect)
The existence of case (11b) is what provides for the occurrence of true ambiguities, as noticed by Diesing (1992) for English, exemplified below:
I am indebted to P. Bertinetto for discussion of some terminological issues relative to these distinctions. 8 These conclusions reinforce, then, those advanced by Higginbotham and Ramchand (1997) about the fundamental insufficiency of this distinction for the interpretation of BNs.
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(12)
In questi casi, pompieri di grande esperienza intervengono in soccorso delle vittime dellincidente. Ex/Gen In such cases, firemen of great experience run to the rescue of the victims of the accident. 3.4. K(ind)-Level Predicates
A third class of relevant predicates is constituted by Carlsons so-called K(ind)-level predicates, namely those that cannot apply singularly to the objects which realize a kind but only collectively to the kind itself; here genericity could, obviously, not be achieved just through generalization from predications about events concerning individual objects. As a matter of fact neither Gen nor Ex are possible (non-taxonomic) readings here for an Italian BN: (13) a.* Elefanti di colore bianco sono estinti. White-colored elephants have become extinct. b.*Elefanti di colore bianco diventano sempre pi grandi man mano che si va a nord. White-colored elephants grow larger as one drives north. c.* Elefanti di colore bianco sono cos chiamati per la pigmentazione della loro pelle. White-colored elephants are so-called because of the pigmentation of their skin. (Sentence (13b) is irrelevantly grammatical with Ex under a pragmatically improbable non-K-level reading of the predicate.) 3.5. Bare Nouns and Overt Indefinites To sum up, the readings of Romance BN subjects seem to be roughly distributed as follows:9 (14) a. Ex only with S-level predicates (as in English; cf. Kratzer 1988; Diesing 1992) b. Gen only with habitual aspect or adverbs of generality (more restricted than in English, as will be widely discussed below)
Recall that predicates used in episodic sentences appear to be necessarily S-level, since I-level predicates were noticed to always give rise to characterizing sentences.
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Notice that the notion I-level does not play any direct role in the description of the assignment rules for the two readings.10 But there is an even more interesting empirical observation to be made: as anticipated, a crucial and so far unnoticed generalization is that the same interpretive properties of Romance BNs hold of Romance (and, to a large extent, English) overtly indefinite DPs (whether they are plurals, introduced by a cardinal determiner or by the so-called partitive article of Italian or French, or singulars introduced by an indefinite article11) in exactly the same environments; cf. the following examples, which correspond to the previous ones of (6) through (11) and of (13): (15) a. Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco hanno creato in passato grande curiosit. Ex Part.art/Two white-colored elephants raised a lot of curiosity in the past. b. Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco possono creare grande curiosit. Gen/?Ex Part.art./Two white-colored elephants may raise a lot of curiosity. c. Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco hanno creato sempre/spesso in passato grande curiosit. Gen/?Ex Part.art./Two white-colored elephants always/often raised a lot of curiosity in the past. (16) Dei/Due cani da guardia di grosse dimensioni sono piu efficienti. Gen Part.art./Two watchdogs of large size are more efficient. Uno stato di grandi dimensioni pericoloso. A state of large size is dangerous.
(17) a.
b.??Uno stato di grandi dimensioni prospero. A state of large size is prosperous. (18) a. Un cane da guardia di grosse dimensioni pi efficiente/ aggressivo. A watchdog of large size is more efficient/aggressive.
10 Actually, Higginbotham and Ramchand (1997) have convincingly questioned the idea that, in English at least, Ex is possible for BN subjects of all S-level predicates. Therefore, even the notion S-level might fail to play a role in a more accurate version of the assignment rules. 11 On the partitive article cf. Delfitto (1993), Chierchia (1997); for its origin in Romance see Foulet (1928).
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b.??Un cane da guardia di grosse dimensioni pi peloso/nero. A watchdog of large size is more hairy/black. (19) a. Un uccello di zone paludose ghiotto di insetti. A bird from marshy areas is greedy for insects.
b.??Un uccello di zone paludose scuro/intelligente A bird from marshy areas is dark/intelligent. (20) a. * Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco sono estinti. Part.art./Two white-colored elephants have become extinct. b. * Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco diventano sempre pi grandi man mano che si va a nord. Part.art./Two white-colored elephants grow larger as one drives north. c. * Degli/Due elefanti di colore bianco sono cos chiamati per il loro colore. Part.art./Two white-colored elephants are so-called because of their color. The examples provided here could be easily and abundantly replicated interchanging the various predicates and the different types of indefinite determiners without essentially affecting the general conclusions. 4. ROMANCE
AND
ENGLISH BNS
Now, three systematic differences have already emerged between Italian and English BNs w.r.t. Gen, in clear contrast to Chierchias (1996) prediction: the generic reading of Italian BNs is in fact impossible with classical kindlevel predicates as in (13), with episodic S-level predicates as in (6a), and with class B I-level predicates, while in all such cases the corresponding BNs in English can easily be generic. Notice in this respect that the generic interpretation of the English gloss of (6a) cannot be simply attributed to the existence of the imperfective, i.e. habitual, aspectual reading of the English simple past, since the contrast obtains also in cases where such an habitual reading is semantically out of question: (21) a. Elefanti di colore bianco passeranno il Giudizio Universale domani alle 5.12 Ex White-colored elephants will undergo the Final Judgment tomorrow at 5. Ex/Gen
12 Under the conceivable, though theologically improbable, interpretation that species are judged by God in terms of collective responsibility.
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b. Elefanti di colore bianco sono stati sterminati in massa da un cataclisma nel 1874. Ex White-colored elephants were mass-exterminated by cataclysm in 1874. Ex/Gen As a consequence of this recognition, then, it appears that Gen is possible with a good deal of Italian BNs, pace Casalegno (1987) (cf. exs. (8b, c), (6), (8c)), but also that some systematically predictable contrast arises between English and Italian with respect to the distribution of this Gen reading, pace Chierchia (1996) (cf. exs. (5a), (7a, b, c) and (8a, b)). Furthermore, pace Longobardi (1994), it appears that a Gen reading may arise also for subjects of certain aspectually well-definable S-level predicates (cf. exs. (5b, c), (8c)), thus displaying a distribution less restricted than assumed in my own previous work.13 5. ANAPHORIC BINDING
English BNs are also known to provide ambiguities in sentences like the following (from Carlson 1999): (22) Cats think very highly of themselves.
Themselves may refer back to the whole species (kind anaphora) or, distributively, to each individual cat. A Romance BN may occur in a corresponding situation (a characterizing predication) with a generic reading, of course: (23) Gatti di grandi dimensioni hanno unalta opinione degli umani. Cats of great size have a high opinion of humans.
But such BN does not provide the species (non-distributive) reading for the anaphor: (24) Gatti di grandi dimensioni hanno unalta opinione di se stessi. Cats of great size have a high opinion of themselves.
The sentence only means that each individual cat thinks highly of itself, although the other reading is by no means impossible in Italian if a non13
BNs of the form N1 di Demonstrative N2, where the second N belongs to a set of classificatory items meaning king, size, etc. must be kept out of the picture here. They systematically behave not like generic BNs, but rather like definite generic DPs of the sort discussed in Section 8.2 and seem in any case to induce one of those taxonomic readings from which we are abstracting away in this article. As a fundamental reference for an analysis of these constructions cf. Zamparelli (1995).
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BN (specifically a definite plural: cf. section 3.1 below) is used to replace the BN. Once again, in this pattern Italian generic BNs behave like overt indefinite generics: (25) a. Un gatto di grandi dimensioni ha unalta opinione di se stesso. A cat of great size has a high opinion of itself. b. Dei gatti di grandi dimensioni hanno unalta opinione di se stessi. Part.art. cats of great size have a high opinion of themselves. The non-distributive reading is in fact as impossible in (25b) as it was in (24) and even more strongly so in the singular example (25a). 6. OBJECT BARE NOUNS
Object BNs have been generally less carefully considered in the literature (with the important exception of Lacas 1990 and Dobrovie-Sorin and Lacas 1996 and subsequent work); once analyzed in the correct perspective, they turn out, modulo some minor independent complications, 14 to behave like the subject ones and to confirm all the generalizations arrived at above. Longobardi (1994) had already noticed that (in contrast with English) some object BNs in Italian are not ambiguous but only display the existential reading; this is the case with objects of episodic predications: (26) Ho escluso solo vecchie signore. I only excluded (episodic asp.) old ladies. Ex
The very same lexical predicate, used in a characterizing environment, may resume a generic reading for its object BN: (27) Una buona legge esclude solo cittadini stranieri dal diritto di voto. Gen/Ex A fair law only excludes foreign citizens from the right to vote.
Other predicates seem to express a permanent property of the complement and can, thus, be viewed as lexically I-level w.r.t. the object argument; thus they allow the generic interpretation and actually disfavor the existential one, an important observation by Dobrovie-Sorin and Laca (1996): (28) Amo/Adoro/Mi piacciono arance di grandi dimensioni. I love/adore/like oranges of large size. Gen
14 One may abstract away here from such complications, which are otherwise very revealing of other properties of quantificational generic readings and support part of Diesings Mapping Hypothesis quite directly. Cf. Longobardi (2000a) for details.
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Finally, some predicates, known to be K-level with respect to the object, disallow generic bare objects completely: (29) * Roentgen ha scoperto raggi X.15 Roentgen discovered X-rays.
As one may expect on the grounds of the behavior of subjects, an overt indefinite determiner like the partitive article essentially retains all the interpretations of the corresponding BN: (30) a. Ho escluso solo delle vecchie signore. I only excluded partit.art. old ladies. Ex
b. Una buona legge esclude solo dei cittadini stranieri dal diritto di voto. Gen/Ex A fair law only excludes partit.art. foreign citizens from right to vote. c. Amo/Adoro/Mi piacciono delle arance di grandi dimensioni. Gen I love/adore/like partit.art. oranges of large size. d.*Roentgen ha scoperto dei raggi X. Roentgen discovered partit.art. X-rays. Thus, the pattern of object BNs essentially parallels that of subjects exemplified in section 2.1 and can be understood by means of the same conceptual apparatus. Again, it distinguishes Italian and English in the case of episodic and K-level predications: for, the English gloss of (26) is ambiguous between Ex and Gen, as argued in Longobardi (1994), and that of (29) is acceptable. Along the lines of (26) is also the following ItalianEnglish contrast, paralleling those of (8a, b) in that it relies on an unambiguously non-habitual interpretation of tense: (31) Ieri alle 5.10 No stava salvando leoni. Yesterday, at 5.10, Noah was saving lions. 7. SOME DESCRIPTIVE CONCLUSIONS Ex (ambiguous)
We may conclude that Italian BNs interpretively pattern exactly like (both Romance and English) overt indefinites in achieving a generic reading only in environments in which the sentence independently provides an external operator of generality. In fact such a reading has been found with:
15
As usual, the judgments abstract away from the possibility of taxonomic readings.
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(32) a. S-level predicates with habitual aspect b. I-level predicates with habitual aspect c. adverbs of generalizing quantification16 Let us call all such environments characterizing. Furthermore, the generic reading of Italian BNs is crucially impossible when the nominal must necessarily denote the kind itself and not an indefinite number of instantiations thereof; this was shown to be the case with: (33) a. kind level predicates b. kind anaphora Now, notice that in all the cases above, even those where the generic reading was not possible for a BN in Italian, it can be restored (or retained) by replacing the (mass or plural) BN with the corresponding overtly definite DP e.g. by substituting gli elefanti di colore bianco the white-colored elephants for elefanti di colore bianco white-colored elephants. (34) a. Gli elefanti di colore bianco hanno creato in passato grande curiosit. Gen The white-colored elephants raised a lot of curiosity in the past. b. Gli elefanti di colore bianco sono estinti. The white-colored elephants have become extinct. Gen
c. Gli elefanti di colore bianco diventano sempre pi grandi man mano che si va a nord. Gen The white-colored elephants grow larger as one drives north. d. Gli elefanti di colore bianco sono cos chiamati per la pigmentazione della loro pelle. Gen The white-colored elephants are so-called because of the pigmentation of their skin. e. Gli elefanti di colore bianco passeranno il Giudizio Universale domani alle 5. Gen The white-colored elephants will undergo the Final Judgment tomorrow at 5. f. Gli elefanti di colore bianco sono stati sterminati in massa da un cataclisma. Gen The white-colored elephants were mass-exterminated by a cataclysm.
16 To these another class of elements must be assimilated, that labeled quantificational predicates (like abound, be rare, etc.) in Carlson and Pelletier (1995), which will be discussed in some detail in future work.
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(35) a. Gli stati di grandi dimensioni sono prosperi. The states of large size are prosperous. b. I cani da guardia di grosse dimensioni sono pi pelosi. The watchdogs of large size are more hairy. c. Gli uccelli di zone paludose sono scuri/intelligenti. The birds from marshy areas are dark/intelligent. (36) a. Ho escluso solo le vecchie signore. I only excluded the old ladies.
Gen Gen Gen Gen
b. Una buona legge esclude solo i cittadini stranieri dal diritto di voto. Gen A fair law only excludes the foreign citizens from right to vote. c. Amo/Adoro/Mi piacciono le arance di grandi dimensioni. Gen I love/adore/like the oranges of large size. d. Roentgen ha scoperto i raggi X. Roentgen discovered the X-rays. Gen
Finally, Romance generic definite plurals provide the same ambiguity as English BNs in the environments of (24). Both the species and the distributive reading are possible for the anaphoric structure in (37): (37) I gatti di grandi dimensioni hanno unalta opinione di se stessi. The cats of great size have a high opinion of themselves.
This last observation exhausts, thus, the empirical material sustaining the generalizations summed up in (5) above. Let us move on to the theoretical interpretation of such generalizations. 8. TWO TYPES
OF
GENERICITY
8.1. Indefinite Generics To sum up, Romance BNs appear to be empirically characterized by these four properties: (38) a. The contextual distribution of their interpretations as Ex or Gen is exactly the same as that of Romance and English overt indefinites. b. In all the relevant environments an existential or generic operator, respectively, is likely to be independently provided in the sentence.
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c. Like overt indefinites, they fail to denote a kind, as would be required for subjects of true K-level predicates.17 d. Again like overt indefinites, they only allow the distributive reading of anaphoric structures such as (24). These generalizations naturally suggest the hypothesis (39), a conclusion that agrees with Dobrovie Sorin (2001) and Delfitto (in press): (39) Romance BNs are always indefinites ( la Heim 1982), i.e. quantificational variables existentially or generically bound.
In fact (38ab) suggest that a variable is introduced in the logical representation of Romance argument BNs and would be unselectively bound by the operator independently provided in the sentence; (38cd) strongly suggest that this variable would necessarily range over the individual instantiations (objects) of the kind lexically named by the head noun. As a consequence, BNs would correctly denote whatever object is denoted by each of the values of the variable and the lexical kind-meaning of the noun would just act predicatively in the restrictor, as we have assumed to be the case with overt quantificational determiners. Of the two a priori available strategies to attain a Gen reading quantificational generalization over objects of a certain kind and denotation of that kind Romance BNs may, then, only resort to the former. As a consequence, they must certainly be quantificational and not referential arguments, in the sense introduced in section 2. 8.2. Definite Generics Romance definite (plural and mass) generics appear to be empirically characterized by the following properties: (40) a. They are not bound to occur in characterizing environments and are found in absolutely episodic sentences. b. They can be subjects of true K-level predicates. c. They can be antecedents to kind-denoting anaphoric expressions. In this sense, their distribution and interpretation resembles that of singular count definite generics (e.g. the lion) rather than that of overt indefinite generics (e.g. a lion). For in both English and Romance singular count
17 I am relying here on Gerstner and Krifka (1987), among others, for the natural assumption that the generic reading required of subjects of K-level predicates cannot be constructed by means of object-level quantification, but is achieved only through kind-level denotation.
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definites as well may occur as generics in virtually all the environments of (34)(37). The syntactic evidence, thus, forces one to recognize at least two major types of generic nominals in Italian: indefinite generics, including BNs, with the properties sketched out in (38) above, and definite generics, with the properties in (40).18 Now, (40a) suggests that in the case of definite generics we have to do with DP-internal (essentially context-independent) genericity, (40bc) that such nominal arguments may be kind-denoting and not object-denoting expressions. How is this kind denotation achieved? One possibility is that it is achieved in the simplest possible way, i.e. (kind-)referentially: if this were correct, the kind meaning that was taken as a lexical characteristic of common nouns might be used not just to provide a predicate in the restrictor of a variable ranging over the objects of that kind, but could enable the nominal argument to act referentially as a kind name.19 To sum up, the facts above may be interpreted as suggesting that a kinddenoting reading is available to Romance definite nominals but not to indefinites, including Italian BNs. It is useful to repeat and stress that the latter follow, in this respect, the well-known behavior of English singular indefinites, as exemplified in the glosses of the corresponding Italian sentences above. Therefore, exactly like other indefinites, Romance BNs can only be interpreted through the introduction of an object-level variable, i.e. as existentially quantified and, in some well definable environments, also as generically quantified, but not as kind-denoting expressions: certainly, they can never exploit the kind-naming meaning of the head noun to make the whole argument into a referential expression. This hypothesis is exposed in (41)(42): (41) a. Kind-denoting generics are only expressible through overtly definite DPs in Romance and are likely to be referential arguments (kind names).
French, which is known to disallow argument BNs completely, largely resorting to the partitive article in their place (this is perhaps a reflex of the impoverished number morphology of French, as argued by Delfitto and Schroten 1992), patterns, instead, like the rest of Romance with respect to definite generics. 19 In such cases the definite article would be likely not to act as an operator, but as a purely expletive element, as argued in Vergnaud and Zubizarreta (1992) and Longobardi (1994).
18
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b. Object-denoting generics are expressible through various sorts of indefinite DPs (indef. art., partitive art., cardinality expressions, bare nouns) bound by unselective generic operators and are necessarily quantificational arguments. (42) Generic operators (providing for characterizing environments) are: habitual aspect, appropriate quantificational lexemes, like adverbs (and certain predicates: cf. fn. 16).
Once more, even on purely syntactic and crosslinguistic evidence, genericity, as suggested by Gerstner and Krifka (1987), turns out to be an epiphenomenon covering at least two quite distinct interpretative strategies: kind denotation and object-level quantification (i.e. generalizations over objects). 9. A C O M PA R AT I V E A N A LY S I S 9.1. English Bare Nouns The crucial difference between the genericity pattern of Italian BNs, summed up in (32), and that of English BNs, as described e.g. in Diesing (1992), is, then, that genericity seems possible in English in at least three subcases where it is disallowed in Romance, i.e. with episodic predicates (in both subject and object position), with class B (non-eventive) I-level predicates, and with classical K-level predicates as well; furthermore, the non-distributive (essentially kind-denoting) reading of the anaphor is possible in (22). Thus, there is a precise set of well-definable environments in which Italian and English BNs systematically contrast in meaning possibilities. In such environments, Romance BNs behave rather like Romance and English overt indefinites, whereas, by contrast, English BNs can be generic in an essentially context-free fashion, thus distributionally correspond to overt definite nominals of Romance (and, to some extent, also to English overt definite singulars, like the white elephant). Therefore, it becomes natural to put forth two hypotheses: first, to assume the restriction of one type of generic reading to the characterizing environments of (32) to be universal (the specification of such environments is in any case necessary with English grammar as well, as part of the conditions on the interpretation of overt indefinites; second, to suppose that English BNs have an additional possibility to achieve a generic reading (a conclusion based on insights of Longobardi (1994) and Dobrovie-Sorin
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and Laca (1996) and again in agreement with Dobrovie Sorin (2001) and Delfitto (in press).20 Following the reasoning laid out above for Romance definites this additional possibility must be a type of kind denotation available on a DP-internal (context-independent) basis. Now, if the kind denotation of definite DPs could well be achieved directly through kind reference, this is a fortiori true and more plausible indeed by far the least costly hypothesis for English BNs, precisely because they are bare, i.e. no candidate for the operator role of a quantificational structure appears. This prompts the following conjecture: (43) English generic bare nouns in environments other than (32) are not quantificational, but kind-referential expressions (proper names for kinds).
If (43) is correct, then, English BNs may be (semantically, though not in their overt syntax, at least) ambiguous: they can be either kind names (Carlsons 1977a, b original intuition, in a way) or variables (the latter, in turn, existentially or generically bound), as treated e.g. in Kratzer-Diesings framework.21
The conclusion appears to also agree with the spirit, at least, of some proposals in Dayal (1999). 21 The idea that English BNs might be potentially ambiguous even as generics is anticipated in Carlson and Pelletier (1995, 11): the attribution of a quantificational generic reading, in addition to being the null hypothesis (given their behavior as existentials), is based on their patterning more with overt indefinites than with singular definites when not denoting a natural or well-established kind: (i) a. A wounded tiger is dangerous. b. ? The wounded tiger is dangerous. c. Wounded tigers are dangerous.
20
On such examples also cf. Vergnaud and Zubizarreta (1992). To some extent, still to be fully investigated, traces of this pattern might arise even with Romance definite plurals in the environments of (i): (ii) a. Una tigre ferita pericolosa. A wounded tiger is dangerous. b. ? La tigre ferita pericolosa. The wounded tiger is dangerous. c. Le tigri ferite sono pericolose. The wounded tigers are dangerous. Though subtle, such data suggests that Romance definites as well can be quantificational generics, in addition to kind names, in the appropriate environment. A seemingly correct prediction about Romance definites is that in the few pragmatically conceivable examples in which English BNs not denoting a natural kind are compatible with a true K-level
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Anyhow, of the four main classes of entities taken into consideration in this work it turned out that three unequivocally display the same interpretative properties, thus forming a natural class, while one is singled out as systematically different, hence as spurious in the system, namely English BNs:22 Romance overt indefinites English overt indefinites Romance bare nouns English bare nouns
In this sense, conceptually though not empirically, Casalegnos (1987) original intuition was correct, in drawing a sharp grammatical distinction precisely between Italian BNs and English BNs. 9.2. The Two Mapping Systems The analysis presented allows us to state in a more formal way a fundamental difference between the mapping of nominal structures to semantic properties in Italian vs. English (probably extendable to most other Romance/Germanic languages, respectively): (44) Romance bare nouns are only quantificational expressions (i.e. variables, indefinites); they thus behave like overt indefinites and unlike proper names. English bare nouns can also be referential (i.e. generic constants, kind names); they thus behave unlike overt indefinites and like proper names (cf. Carlson 1977a, b).
predicate, the structure should nonetheless sound awkward, owing to the impossibility of both the quantificational and the referential strategy: (iii)
22
? Le tigri ferite diventano pi grandi man mano che si va a Nord. Wounded tigers grow bigger as one drives north.
It is important, however, not to obscure the fact that there remain crucial interpretive properties which are peculiar of BNs in either Romance and English and contrast with those of overt indefinites: in particular the property of non-presuppositionality of existential BNs (Diesing 1992, Longobardi, forthcoming), and that of scopelessness (Carlson 1977a, b), along with its suspension in certain environments, especially focused on by Chierchia (1996) and Delfitto (1997). For some account of such properties, hopefully compatible with the syntactic conclusions reached here, cf. the references cited. It could be tentatively suggested that in the basic case the scopal differences between overt indefinites and BNs must be imputed to the fact that undergoing some version of QR to achieve wider scope is a lexical property of determiners, while the D of the BNs is completely deprived of any lexical content.
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This parametrization, better summarized in (45)(46) below, makes the differences in interpretation between Romance and English BNs fully understandable and largely predictable without any appeal to vague pragmatic or lexical criteria: (45) English BNs:
referential quantificational
Gen
(in all environments23) (in characterizing environments) (in S-level environments) (in characterizing environments) (in S-level environments)
{ Gen Ex { Gen Ex
(46) Romance BNs: quantificational
We correctly predict that there will be, on the surface, two sources of Ex/Gen ambiguity (non-complementarity) or English BNs, exemplified by the glosses of examples (21a) and (8c) respectively, both repeated below; whereas there will be only one source of ambiguity for Italian BNs (just (8c) is ambiguous in Italian): (21) a. Elefanti di colore bianco passeranno il Giudizio Universale domani alle 5. Ex White-colored elephants will undergo the Final Judgment tomorrow at 5. Ex/Gen (8) c. In questi casi, pompieri di grande esperienza intervengono in soccorso dele vittime dellincidente. Ex/Gen In such cases, firemen of great experience run to the rescue of the victims of the accident. Ex/Gen In the remaining part I will discuss the import of the present conclusions for the theories of determinerless nouns proposed by Diesing (1992) (also cf. Kratzer 1988) and by Longobardi (1994).
As pointed out to me by Greg Carlson, the present analysis leads to the consequence of predicting that a kind-referring interpretation should be a priori available to English BNs even in certain environments traditionally taken to be reserved for existential readings, as in Dogs are everywhere or Dogs are sitting on my lawn. This interpretation in such examples would be pragmatically improbable (because of obvious material limits on the kind dogs) but by no means ungrammatical: the conclusion is not implausible also to judge from the analogous intuition on the counterparts of these BNs when accompanied by the definite article in Italian.
23
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9.3. Bare Nouns and the Mapping Hypothesis Let us recall the main theorems following from Diesings (1992) system of axioms (her Mapping Hypothesis) for the description of English BNs: (47) a. For BNs outside VP: b. For BNs inside VP: with S-level predicates = Ex/Gen with I-level predicates = Gen Ex (Gen only in a proper subset of cases, those possibly admitting covert scrambling24)
The Mapping Hypothesis is essentially a condition defining the scope of two operators unselectively binding object-level variables (indefinites), namely Ex and Gen. Notice that at least one crucial aspect of Diesings Mapping Hypothesis has received straightforward confirmation precisely from the Romance domain, namely (47b) (cf. Longobardi 2000a): it has been argued that all generic BNs and overt indefinites actually occur in VP-external positions in Italian, precisely as predicted by the Mapping Hypothesis. However, some apparent problems for the approach arise from the picture presented in this article. Recall, in fact, the empirical data motivating the parametric proposal, summed up below for convenience: (48) English but not Italian BNs can be generic in subject position with all sorts of predicates, in particular with: a. episodic predicates (cf. translations of (6a), (21a, b)) b. true K-level predicates (cf. translations of (13)) c. stative (Class B) I-level predicates (cf. translations of (8b), (9b), 10b)) English but not Italian BNs can be generic in object position with all sorts of predicates, in particular with: d. episodic predicates (cf. translation of (26)) e. K-level predicates (cf. translation of (29)) English but not Italian generic BNs may bind a kind-denoting (non-distributive) anaphoric expression: f. cf. (22)(24)
24 Diesing (1992) presents evidence that some object BNs can be scrambled out of VP, covertly in English, overtly in German, and attributes the possibility of genericity to them, in agreement with the Mapping Hypothesis. Longobardi (2000a) provides evidence from Romance that object BNs with a generic interpretation are actually moved out of VP, thus confirming the plausibility of that line of reasoning. The point here, however, is that English object BNs are, again, generic in situations where the Romance ones cannot be, in principle with all verbs pragmatically compatible with a kind reading of their complement.
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The Mapping Hypothesis might look too strong for English in cases (48d, e) and perhaps (48f), too weak for Romance in cases (48ac). However, the first problem is now automatically solved by our admitting the possibility of referential genericity for English BNs, i.e. of a generic reading independent of any quantificational consideration.25 The second problem is settled by adopting the characterizing/episodic distinction and restricting the definition of generic operators to the former type of environments. Thus, the present analysis does not contradict the Mapping Hypothesis, but rather complements it by addressing and removing some of its potential counterexamples. 9.4. Bare Nouns and Proper Names Longobardi (1991, 1994, 1996) has made two core proposals concerning the syntax-semantics mapping in the domain of nominal denotation. First, such works have pointed out the existences of a salient distinction between Romance and English nominal syntax concerning proper names in argument function, i.e. nouns forming object-referential argument phrases (PNs). In English such nouns may occur determinerless while remaining in the normal post-adjectival position of determined nouns, i.e. they do not need to either be introduced by an overt determiner or move to the pre-adjectival D position (they actually cannot): from this viewpoint they do not differ structurally from bare common nouns. This behavior is well revealed by examples with adjective-noun sequences: (49) a. Ancient Rome (was destroyed by the barbarians) b.*Rome ancient (was destroyed by the barbarians) (50) a. I met third children everywhere. b.*I met children third everywhere. In Romance, object-referring nouns in argument function are always necessarily introduced by a phonetically expanded D node: either they occur
25 Chierchias (1996) total assimilation of the semantic properties of Italian and English BNs, which we have seen to be ultimately untenable, is probably based on the overgeneralization of his correct observation that Italian and English BNs do not differ in their scopal properties (cf. fn. 22 above). However, such scopal properties, essentially by definition, concern quantificational, not referential readings, which is the point on which Italian and English actually differ. Therefore, once the two readings of English BNs are finally recognized, no reason seems to remain not to accept that Italian and English BNs may parametrically differ in crucial aspects of their denoting properties without differing in the scopelessness phenomena.
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after a visible determiner (an expletive article, in Vergnaud and Zubizarretas (1992), Longobardis (1994) sense) or are themselves moved to D (hence necessarily crossing over adjectives), giving rise to typical patterns like (51): (51) a.* Antica Roma (fu distrutta dai barbari) Ancient Rome (was destroyed by the barbarians) b. Roma antica (fu distrutta dai barbari) Rome ancient (was destroyed by the barbarians) c. Lantica Roma (fu distrutta dai barbari) The ancient Rome (was destroyed by the barbarians) Therefore: (52) In some languages determinerless argument proper names must undergo overt N-to-D raising, in others they never do.
In this sense the syntax of Romance proper names sharply contrasts with that of bare common nouns, which is essentially the same as in English (no N-to-D raising), as can be seen from obligatorily prenominal adjectives like the ordinal one in (53). (53) a. Ho incontrato terzi figli dappertutto. I met third children everywhere. b.*Ho incontrato figli terzi dappertutto. I met children third everywhere. The surface DP-internal structures involved are represented in (54) (with e symbolizing the lack of overt determiner, which at least in Romance may be independently argued to be represented by an actual empty category; cf. Contreras (1986) and subsequent work): (54) a. English BNs [e (Adj) N] b. Romance BNs [e (Adj) N] = English PNs [e (Adj) N] Romance PNs [Art (Adj) N] [N (Adj) t]
Second, Longobardi (1994, 1996) has also proposed the existence of a crucial and perhaps surprising typological generalization, crosslinguistically relating the two types of determinerless nominal arguments:
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Proper names may occur without a D phonetically filled (by an expletive determiner or by N-raising) iff generic (plural or mass) nouns may do so in all environments (i.e. iff BNs can be generic even in the environments of (48), in the terms of this article).
In other words, whereas English and Romance PNs differ in their syntax, English and Romance BNs differ in their semantics, but the two differences are parametrically related: if the semantics of BNs is of the English type, the syntax of PNs will be of the English type as well, and vice versa. If correct, (55) sets a standard of typological adequacy to be met by any serious theory either of bare nouns or of proper names. Though empirically well motivated (other Germanic languages may pattern on the English side, most of Romance and probably Greek pattern on the Italian side;26 cf. below) and technically expressible, the relation between the two phenomena remained conceptually hard to understand. Under the present approach to the semantic parametrization of BNs, the typological generalization becomes perfectly understandable: PNs are referential expressions actually object-referential; BNs differ in Italian and English precisely with respect to their capacity to function referentially kind-referentially of course. Thus, PNs and referential generic BNs have something a priori in common: they are referential expressions, in the sense defined in section 2 above. In other terms, they both denote whatever they denote (a kind or object, respectively) not through a variable with a predicative restriction but directly through the lexical reference of the head noun. Therefore, (55) turns into the much more perspicuous statement (56): (56) Object-referrring nouns may occur without a phonetically filled D iff kind-referring nouns can.
26 Portuguese, especially well studied in recent work by Munn and Schmitt (1999a, b), seems to represent an exception to the general Romance pattern, as anticipated above: Portuguese apparently admits BNs with a sort of kind-referring reading. By itself, this could just mean that Portuguese has the parameter set on the English value, rather like French does for null subjects. The substantive issue, however, concerns the possible lack of correlation between proper name syntax and bare nominal semantics that is supposed to arise. In fact, Portuguese should behave like English in its proper name syntax, but it clearly does not. In this respect it is a very well-behaved Romance language. Pending further study of the relevant data, a not unreasonable suggestion is that Portuguese determinerless referential arguments may instantiate not BNs, but definite generics, with the licensing of a null expletive article. Such a licensing could instantiate one version of article drop, in the sense of the parametric approach in Crisma (1997) on the close analogy of null subject phenomena. The guess is preliminary and informal, but not implausible or completely ad hoc, given the existence of Portuguese varieties in which even singular arguments can occur bare, with a range of definite generic and indefinite interpretations, which might reveal a hidden expletive and indefinite determiner.
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Longobardis (1991 and subsequent work) generalization can now be understood as follows: BNs can be referential iff they have the same formal syntax as PNs, the prototypical referential expressions. The condition is positively satisfied in English, though not in Italian. To put it differently, languages always resort to a unified strategy to assign object and kind reference to nominal structures, but this strategy is crosslinguistically parametrized: in English referential status can be assigned to nominals with no overtly realized D, in Romance it necessarily depends on a D position overtly occupied either by the noun itself (raised proper names, with object reference) or by its placeholder, an expletive article (referential generic common nouns, with kind reference, or, again, proper names, with object reference).27 The two parametric strategies are represented in (57): (57) a. English: [e (Adj) N] Quantificational b. Romance: [e (Adj) N] Quantificational Referential [Art (Adj) N] [N (Adj) t]
Referential
Therefore, in English, BNs can be referential (instantiate kind-denoting constants), unlike in Romance, precisely because they have the same surface structure as PNs. The crosslinguistic variation in the interpretation of BNs discussed in this paper is reduced to the abstract parametric difference discussed by Longobardi (1994, 1996) with its far-reaching ramifications: in certain languages the referential feature of the determiner position, D, is strong (in an informal sense); that is, visible systematic association of referential items with D (either by overt movement of the noun itself or by means of an expletive placeholder) is necessary, rather in the sense in which question operators must be visibly associated by wh-movement to the clause-initial position in many languages. In other languages, the referential properties of D are weak, i.e. referential readings may affect nominal items not overtly associated with D, exactly as, in some languages, question words are not overtly wh-fronted (Huang 1982, Cheng
27 Of the two formal strategies for reference, Romance kind-denoting nominals can only use one: they can just be expressed through the definite expletive article, not via N-raising to D: Longobardi (1994, 1996) explained this fact in a completely independent way, by attributing it to the marked (Last Resort) status of overt syntactic movement (Chomsky 1995) in conjunction with the assumption that raising to D would not be necessary (a last resort) for common nouns to provide a grammatical output, unlike the case of proper names.
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1991, among much related work).28 N-to-D raising of proper names is thus the other formal rule of syntax whose ultimate association with a precise semantic property is conceptually apparent. Ultimately, what is at the core of the parametric distinction is thus whether the constant or variable status of D must be encoded in the PF or not (cf. Longobardi (1996) for some speculations on this point, inspired by Lazzeronis (1995) observation that related semantic properties in some languages may even ultimately affect the prosodic phonology of head nouns29): in Romance a D empty at PF always gives rise to a variable, in Germanic it need not.30 N-to-D movement or an expletive article are two formal devices to prevent a D from being phonologically empty, hence to achieve a referential reading.31 The same parameter accounting for the syntax of PNs and the semantics of BNs has been argued in the works cited to neatly cover three other morphosyntactic domains in which Romance contrasts with English and other Germanic varieties (especially affecting the syntactic distribution of BNs, the determiners of empty nouns, and Case licensing within DP), so that it eventually turns out to be supported by a cluster of at least five apparently unrelated surface sources of evidence and is a good example of the deductive potential of a sound parametric theory.32
28 The existence of wh-movement with its distinctive semantic properties has, of course, been much longer known by grammarians, implicitly for centuries, explicitly for the past few decades, owing to its superficial saliency. N-to-D movement of proper names, by contrast, was not identified, to my knowledge, before Longobardi (1991), probably because it is often string vacuous. 29 Prosodic alternations apparently dependent on the referential properties of the noun have been reconstructed for some stage of Proto-Indoeuropean by Lazzeroni (1995); at an historical date, alternations in the position of the accent on the same word according to whether it is used as a common noun/adjective or as a proper name (and in other environments according to slightly different manifestations of an abstract scale of referentiality) are documented anciently for Greek and Aryan. These alternating forms are probably lexicalized as different entries at that stage, but might go back to a more productive system in the prehistoric language. In any case, modern Greek still displays accent alternations such as staurs cross vs. Staros proper masculine name, which precisely exhibit the phenomenon, and apparently comparable facts hold in Hungarian (thanks to Melita Stavrou and Judit Gervain, p.c.). It remains to be seen whether there exists any typological implication between such phenomena and strong referential properties of D. 30 The head noun in such structures with empty Ds would naturally end up in the restrictor of the variable. The possibility of expressing the generalization in this way was originally pointed out to me by Brenda Laca (p.c.) and suggested in writing by Benedicto (1997). 31 Natural economy principles, as mentioned in fn. 27, ensure that N-to-D be available only to PNs, while the article strategy is available to both (certain) proper names and common nouns in the generic reading (cf. Longobardi 1996). 32 Benedictos (1997) interesting approach, though sharing important basic insights with the present one and especially with Casalegnos (1987) (not sufficiently accurate) semantic
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9.5. Greek Evidence Longobardis (1991, 1994) hypothesis that a linguistically significant generalization typologically connects the semantics of BNs with the syntax of PNs is subtly confirmed by their behavior in Greek. Consider that Romance and English DPs differ along two apparently separate dimensions: one is the now familiar behavior of BNs and PNs, the other is Romance nouns general ability to appear to the left of most types of attributive adjectives: (58) a. gli/molti elefanti bianchi the/many elephants white b.? i/molti bianchi elefanti the/many white elephants (59) a.* the/many elephants white b. the/many white elephants Following the approach proposed in Bernstein (1991, 1992, 1993), Crisma (1991, 1996), Valois (1991), Cinque (1994), among others, we may take (58a) as the result of N(or N-projection)-raising over the adjective to a position lower than D. Accordingly, the corresponding ungrammaticality of (59a) can be imputed, at least descriptively, to the islandhood with respect to N-raising of a constituent excluding adjectives, call it : (60) the elephanti white [ . . . ti. . .] We will thus say, again descriptively, that the status of with respect to N-movement is parametrized: it is opaque in English (and the rest of Germanic), but transparent in Romance (or in Semitic or Celtic, for that matter: cf. Longobardi, forthcoming). The parametrization can therefore be summarized as follows: (61) Romance English Strong feature of D + Transparent +
conclusions, tries to relate the differences between Romance and English BNs to properties of the verbal systems, obscuring the generalizations clearly connecting them, in my opinion, to PNs and other facets of nominal syntax.
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Now consider a language like Greek. Here adjectives are pronominal, as in Germanic:33 (62) a.* oi/polloi elephantes asproi the/many elephants white. b. oi/polloi asproi elephantes the/many white elephants But the behavior of BNs immediately reveals that they cannot be kinddenoting expressions of the English type, but rather look like indefinites, as in Romance;34 suffice it to show that they are ungrammatical with Klevel predicates and just existential in episodic sentences: (63) a.* Asproi elephantes echoun exaphanisthei. White elephants have become extinct. b.*Asproi elephantes apothekatisth kan apo ena kataklysmo to e 1874. Ex White elephants were exterminated by a cataclysm in 1874. Correspondingly, a generic reading turns grammatical with the insertion of the definite article: (64) a. Oi asproi elephantes echoun exafanisthei. The white elephants have become extinct. Gen
b.*Oi asproi elephantes apothekatisth kan apo ena kataklysmo to e 1874. Gen The white elephants were exterminated by a cataclysm in 1974. Then, if the parametric framework proposed in Longobardi (1991, 1994) and refined in this article is correct, Greek must have strong referential features in D. Greek seems thus to instantiate one of the two pairs of parametric values intermediate between Romance and English predicted by such a system as (61).35 Notice at this point that a theory like the present one, reducing the syntax of PNs and the semantics of BNs to the same parameter, makes a curious prediction precisely about languages with this combination of values: recall
33 Cf. Androutsopoulou (1995), Alexiadou and Stavrou (1999), Stavrou (1999), Campos and Stavrou (2001), and references cited. 34 If anything, it seems that Greek speakers find the existential reading even more prevailing over the generic one than Italian or even Spanish speakers do (I am indebted to Angeliki Ralli for several examples). 35 The other intermediate pair of values (weak D and transparent ) is likely to be instantiated by Celtic languages and is irrelevant to the present reasoning.
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that a D with strong features should either overtly attract object-referring nouns or force the use of an (expletive) article; now, if nouns cannot reach D because they are trapped within the opaque constituent , it follows that all object-referring nouns (proper names) in argument function should be introduced by an overt determiner. The state of affairs abstractly predicted on the basis of the parametric analysis of the Western European languages is therefore quite outlandish from the viewpoint of a surface typology of the same languages (in which at least several geographical names, typologically the most resistant to take an article, may and must occur determinerless), in that it may end up destroying any superficial distinction between the appearance of proper names and that of definite descriptions. Surprising as it may seem, the prediction is straightforwardly borne out. All object-referring arguments in Greek must be introduced by an overt definite determiner, whether personal, geographic, or else: (65) a.*E) Rom einai e proteuousa t s Italias. ( e e (The) Rome is the capital of (the) Italy. b. Xero *(t ) Rom poly kala. e e I-know (the) Rome very well. Such facts reinforce in a decisive way the proposed hypothesis that a true parametric relation exists between the semantics of BNs and the syntax of PNs, in particular the formal properties of N-raising to D, making it even more unlikely that a theory of BNs not capturing this generalization may ultimately be correct. 10. O N C O M PA R AT I V E S E M A N T I C S
To sum up, the present line of analysis recommends itself, in comparison to other actual or conceivable approaches (in particular those only recognizing one type of genericity, whether quantificational or referential), for at least six empirical and conceptual reasons: (66) a. It accounts for the interpretations of English BNs; b. it accounts for the interpretations of Romance BNs; c. it accounts for the interpretations of Romance and English overt indefinites; d. it explains Longobardis typological generalization on the relation between the syntax of PNs and the interpretations of BNs; e. it explains the peculiar conjunction of properties characterizing Greek BNs and PNs;
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f. it makes the Romance evidence more easily compatible with the insights of the Mapping Hypothesis. In all these respects, the theory suggested here improves on other existing proposals, while at the same time being compatible with their seemingly correct parts: conceptually, it retains the core of Carlsons intuition about English BNs as kind-denoting counterparts of proper names; empirically, it integrates well with the Mapping Hypothesis as a condition on all indefinites (thus including quantificational occurrences of BNs) and with Chierchias (1996) and Delfittos (1997) observations on the identity of the scopal behavior of Italian and English BNs. In other words, a good deal of the evidence available in this domain now falls naturally into place. If these conclusions are correct, they confirm that the crucial discovery in this domain of study is precisely that the principles of interpretation of determinerless nouns, whether proper or common, are basically the same, as originally proposed in Longobardi (1991, 1994). More generally, they suggest that a very close and abstract mapping exists between syntax and semantics, which emerges even under parametrically different surface forms. But they also suggest some preliminary and partial answer to the main questions raised in the Introduction: precise crosslinguistic variation of fine-grained interpretive properties, like the difference between referential and quantificational genericity as applied to the interpretation of BNs, actually exists, and shares the main features of classical parametrization, in particular exhibiting two of the properties assigned by parameter theory to morphosyntactic variation, i.e. discreteness and clustering together of several differences.36 In cases such as these, comparative semantics seems definitely possible as a sophisticated descriptive discipline: it appears as contentful as other components of a Principles&Parameters theory of UG and brings together traditionally distinct domains like analytic philosophy, language typology, and dialectology. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that, once the appropriate depth
36 Some of these crosslinguistic differences are, in principle, hardly manifested in childrens primary corpora, since they have often to do with the assumed logical representations of truthfunctionally quasi-equivalent utterances. But the parametric clustering of the interpretation of BNs with other properties opposing Romance and English nominal systems provides an answer to this problem as well. The several visible differences in the behavior of bare nouns and proper names (and in all the other properties proposed to be connected to it in Longobardi (1994, 1996)) make the relevant parameter straightforward to set, triggering the acquisition of certain crosslinguistically variable semantic properties otherwise unlearnable under normal conditions.
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of analysis begins to be attained, semantic differences, at least in this domain, need not be stated as a primitive semantic parameter (in the sense of Chierchia (1996)), but can be traced back to independent differences of a well-known type in the abstract morphosyntax of languages: indeed they seem to be part of the instantiation of one of the most classical and general parameter schemata of syntactic theory (since Huang 1982), namely variation in whether a functional head requires or not to be overtly targeted by movement processes. In this sense, it seems to me that it still remains to be proven that such a thing as semantic parametrization exists independently of the syntactic one. REFERENCES
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GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI

H O W C O M PA R AT I V E I S S E M A N T I C S ? A U N I F I E D PA R A M E T R I C T H E O RY O F B A R E N O U N S AND PROPER NAMES*

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

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c. lexically characterizing A (habitual aspect) Gen d. lexically characterizing B (non-habitual aspect)

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

Gen Gen Gen Gen

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

(46) Romance BNs: quantificational

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

HOW COMPARATIVE IS SEMANTICS?

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