Title of dissertation: THEMATIC RELATIONS BETWEEN NOUNS Juan Carlos Castillo, Doctor of Philosophy, 2001 Dissertation directed by: Professor Juan Uriagereka Department of Linguistics This dissertation explores some of the traditionally labeled possessive relations, and proposes a basic syntactic structure that underlies them. The two nouns act as subject and predicate in a small clause, dominat...

The paper argues for the existence of (NP-level) mass-count distinction in Tashkent Uzbek, an obligatory classifier dialect. Evidence is provided based on distribution and interpretation modifiers, classifiers quantificational suffixes different types, as well properties flexible object mass nouns. A formal analysis further that treats sensitive to but not uniformly serving “individuators” othe...

Languages dispose of a variety of means for classifying and counting different types of objects present in the world. An instance is the much discussed mass-count distinction. In English, count nouns (dog, chair) allow plural marking and modification by cardinal quantifiers (two) and by determiners implicating plurality (several); mass terms (water, sand) do not permit plural marking, nor the q...

We argue that two types of context are central to grounding the semantics for the mass/count distinction. We combine and develop the accounts of Rothstein (2010) and Landman (2011), which emphasize (non-)overlap at a context. We also adopt some parts of Chierchia’s (2010) account which uses precisifying contexts. We unite these strands in a two-dimensional semantics that covers a wide range of ...

The central empirical observation of this paper is that there are polysemous lexical items in a number unrelated languages have similar, not intuitively related, meanings. These meanings 'to arrive'/'to reach,' be enough,' and 'must.' theoretical claim based on case study one such item Logoori (Bantu, JE 41; Kenya). We argue these three all arise from single semantic denotation sensitive to sha...

The question of whether information relevant to meaning (semantics) and structure (syntax) relies on a common language processor or on separate subsystems has proved difficult to address definitively because of the confounds involved in comparing the two types of information. At the sentence level syntactic and semantic judgments make different cognitive demands, while at the single word level,...

Determinerless (or “bare”) mass and plural noun phrases also show a parallel alternation in interpretation, depending on the predicate with which they combine. If the predicate is stagelevel (in the terminology of Carlson 1977a,b), the noun phrase is understood as existentially quantified, as in (4)a. and b., which are roughly equivalent to Some water leaked into the floor and Some raccoons wer...