Universal force from exhaustification: Farsi hame -i DPs

Sentences with exhaustification

(1) a. What did Mary eat? b. Mary ate a pizza. c. Mary ate a pizza and a calzone. As an answer, we can think of (1b) as being ruled out by (1c), because (1c) is more exhaustive, in the sense that it contains additional true information. A number of researchers (e.g., Kuno 1972, Atlas & Levinson 1981, Horn 1981, Szabolcsi 1981, É. Kiss 1998) have noted that exhaustification effects are not limit...

Topics are Conditionals: A Case Study from Exhaustification Over Questions

This paper argues in favor of Haiman’s (1978) idea that conditionals and topics are analogous. The evidence comes from exhaustification over topicalized questions, which have the same semantics as conditional questions (Isaacs & Rawlins, 2008).

Agreement in Masai and the syntax of possessive DPs (I)

Agreement in Maasai and the Syntax of Possessive DPs (I)

Possessive DPs are “complex” in the sense that they involve two distinct nominal expressions as components.1 In this paper I address the issue of characterizing the nature of the syntactic relation holding between these two nominal expressions in possessives whose possessum is arguably not a syntactic argument-taking category. This amounts to providing an account of what licenses the insertion ...

Amazing DPs

Data and Previous Literature: Elliott (1971) points out that DPs introduced by emotive factive predicates (cf. (1)) have exclamative interpretations. Grimshaw (1979) establishes a parallelism between DPs that are introduced by predicates that also take interrogative clauses (Concealed Questions CQs, (2)) and DPs that are introduced by predicates that also take exclamative clauses (cf. (2b)); sh...