DETERMINERS, BARE SINGULARS, PLURALS: A PORTABLE TUTOR FOR SENTENCE GRAMMAR

Bare Plurals, Bare Conditionals, and Only

The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its 'prejacent'). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be...

A Situation-Theoretic Interpretation of Bare Plurals

Norwegian Bare Singulars: a Note on Types and Sorts

The distribution of bare singulars in Norwegian was thoroughly examined in Borthen (2003). The present paper outlines an account of these data in a type-logical semantics of the Neo-Carlsonian kind. The focus is primarily on the syntax-semantics interface, which here, somewhat simplified, amounts to assigning semantic types in the appropriate sortal domain to bare singulars. I argue that bare s...

Evaluation of a Grammar of French Determiners

Existing syntactic grammars of natural languages, even with a far from complete coverage, are complex objects. Assessments of the quality of parts of such grammars are useful for the validation of their construction. We evaluated the quality of a grammar of French determiners that takes the form of a recursive transition network. The result of the application of this local grammar gives deeper ...

Bare Plurals, Situations and Discourse Context

Edinburgh University for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the participants of ITALLC 96, the anonymous referees for that conference and for this volume, and to the audience of a seminar I gave at the University of Texas at Austin in September 1996, for many perceptive questions and comments on this paper and related work.