[PLing] Brno:Guest lecture by Manfred Krifka

[Viola Schmitt]

Dear all,

let me invite you to a guest lecture by **Manfred Krifka** (the head of
Leibniz-Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, ZAS, and professor in
general linguistics at the Institute for German Speech and Linguistics,
Humboldt University in Berlin) which will take place on **April 24th 
14:10**
(Monday) at the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages at the 
**Masaryk
University in Brno**. The topic of the talk is *Pseudo-Incorporated 
Nominals,
Weak Definites and their Anaphoric Uptake* (based on a joint work with
Fereshteh Modarresi), please find the abstract below. The talk will take 
place
in the room **B2.22**, Arna Nováka 1, Brno. Everyone is welcome.

Best regards,
Marcin Wągiel
on behalf of the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages, Masaryk
University in Brno


--
Manfred Krifka & Fereshteh Modarresi
*Pseudo-Incorporated Nominals, Weak Definites and their Anaphoric 
Uptake*

Nominals in argument position may stand in a tight syntactic relation to 
their
head, a phenomenon called pseudo-incorporation by Massam (2001) for the
Polynesian language Niuean, and subsequently identified in many other
languages. The anaphoric potential of such nominals is puzzling: It is 
clearly
reduced compared to nominals with indefinite articles, but under certain
conditions it is possible to refer back anaphorically to 
pseudo-incorporated
antecedents. I will discuss the theoretical proposals that have been 
offered to
account for incorporated nominals and their anaphoric uptake, in 
particular van
Geenhoven (1998) with reference to Greenlandic, Farkas & de Swart (2003) 
with
reference to Hungarian, and Modarresi (2015) with reference to Persian. 
Taking
up an essential amendment of Farkas & de Swart by Yanovich (2008), I 
will
present a proposal couched in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & 
Reyle
1993) according to which pseudo-incorporated nominals introduce 
discourse
referents within the scope of an existential closure operator (Diesing 
1991).
In particular, we argue that a structure like MARY ∃ [APPLE ATE], with 
APPLE a
pseudo-incorporated object, is represented as “there is a (past) event e 
such
that e is an eating of the unique apple in e by Mary”. The object does 
not
introduce a directly accessible discourse referent, but reference to the
object(s) involved can be recovered by the summation operation proposed 
in Kamp
& Reyle (1993). This correctly predicts semantic effects like apparent
indefiniteness and number-neutrality of the pseudo-incorporated nominal 
(‘Mary
ate one or more apples’) and a maximality interpretation of the 
anaphoric
uptake (They were sour interpreted as ‘all the apples Mary ate were 
sour’). It
also predicts a definite interpretation of such nominals in scrambled 
position
outside existential closure, MARY APPLE ∃ [ATE]. I will argue that 
so-called
weak definites in languages like English and German, cf. Schwarz (2014), 
Frey
(2015), are pseudo-incorporated nominals that mark definiteness 
explicitly. I
will also discuss whether the ambiguity between an indefinite and a 
definite
interpretation of nominals in Slavic languages can be attributed to 
their
interpretation internal or external to existential closure.