Definiteness and Eventive Nominals

This paper discusses the interpretation of complex noun phrases. More specifically, it investigates the type of object that a noun phrase 1 denotes. It has been recognized for some time that noun phrases must be able to denote individuals in some circumstances, events in other cases, propositions in still others (Zucchi 1993, Peterson 1997). I will show that, on the one hand, there are various strategies by which different types of interpretation for noun phrases arise, and on the other hand, the choice of these different strategies is highly dependent on the internal structure of the noun phrases themselves, including in particular its argument structure and its definiteness. This paper proceeds as follows. In section 2 I will discuss the concept of coercion of noun phrases into propositions for interpretation. In section 3 I will introduce the event-nominal exception to definiteness in implicit conditionals, and give my proposal for what causes this exception. In section 4 I will modify the proposal to account for further distributional differences. Section 5 discusses indefinites and a refutation of an alternative explanation for the exceptional behavior of event nominals, while section 6 discusses an outstanding problem for the account. Section 7 gives a brief conclusion.