On the semantics of indefinite free relatives
نویسنده
چکیده
Unlike Germanic, Italian and many other languages from different language families allow whclauses to occur as the complement of existential predicates and be interpreted as indefinites. I call these whclauses indefinite free relatives. A compositional semantics will be given for indefinite free relatives that is based on Jacobson’s (1995) proposal for the semantics of whwords. In a nutshell, I will argue that indefinite free relatives denote a singleton set which contains only a maximal plural individual. The matrix predicate takes this set as its complement and asserts its non-emptiness.
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