Italian and dialects express indefiniteness in different ways, among which with a null determiner (ZERO) like all other Romance languages, but also the definite article (ART) unlike what is found Romance. some northern display so-called “partitive determiner” DI+ART, present French. Few northwestern (bare) DI, parallel to We adopt Cardinaletti Giusti’s (2015, 2016) unified analysis build on (20...

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such regularization. We conducted three artificial languag...

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 ...

We consider collective quantification in natural language. For many years the common strategy in formalizing collective quantification has been to define the meanings of collective determiners, quantifying over collections, using certain typeshifting operations. These type-shifting operations, i.e., lifts, define the collective interpretations of determiners systematically from the standard mea...

This paper suggests that the continuation-passing style (CPS), a classic technique commonly used in computer science but that has recently been successfully applied to linguistics as in the case of Barker (2002) and others, accounts for different interpretations for floating quantifiers (FQ) and non-floating quantifiers (nonFQ). In a determinerless language such as Japanese, the interpretation ...

We consider collective quanti cation in natural language. For many years the common strategy in formalizing collective quanti cation has been to de ne the meanings of collective determiners, quantifying over collections, using certain type-shifting operations. These type-shifting operations, i.e., lifts, de ne the collective interpretations of collective determiners systematically from the stan...