Paula Menedez-Benito (University of Goettingen) will give the department colloquium tomorrow, Monday, March 4th at 4:00PM in Machmer W-27. The title of her talk is "Epistemic Indefinites," and an abstract follows.
Epistemic Indefinites: The Case of Spanish
(joint work with Luis Alonso-Ovalle (McGill))
Across languages, we find epistemic indefinites, existential determiners that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker (see Haspelmath (1997)). Over the last fifteen years, a substantial body of work on the semantics of epistemic indefinites has appeared (see references in Alonso-Ovalle and Mene ́ndez-Benito (to appear)). Taken together, these studies outline a research program that aims to provide an explanatory semantic typology of epistemic indefinites by determining across which parameters epistemic indefinites can vary, how these parameters interact, and why. The work presented in this talk contributes to this enterprise by analyzing the epistemic effect of Spanish "algu ́n," and investigating the interaction of this effect with number morphology.
In its singular form, Spanish algu ́n conveys speaker’s ignorance. By using "alga ́n" in (1a), the speaker signals that she does not know which student María married. Hence, it would be odd for her to add a namely continuation that explicitly identifies the student in question, as in (1b). Surprisingly, the plural version of "algu ́n," "algunos," does not trigger an ignorance effect, as shown by (2). This talk provides an account of the contrast between (1) and (2). We will argue (i) that the epistemic effect of "algún" comes about because this item imposes an anti-singleton constraint on its domain of quantification, and (ii) that the interaction of this constraint with plural morphology blocks the epistemic effect. The talk also reports on work in progress that extends this account to the complex determiner "algu ́n que otto," which conveys an ‘I don’t know how many’ effect (witness (3)). The picture that emerges from this investigation is that epistemic effects triggered by indefinites are linked to properties of the domain of quantification, such as the size of the domain, its internal structure, and the type of entities quantified over.
(1) a. María se casó con algún estudiante.
María married with ALGUN student
(Maria married some student or other.)
b. María se casó con algún estudiante # en concreto con Juan.
María married with ALGUN student namely Juan
(Maria married some student or other, namely John.)
(2) María vive con algunos estudiantes, en concreto con Pedro y con Juan.
María lives with ALGUNOS student, namely Pedro and Juan
(Maria lives with some student, namely Pedro and Juan.)
(3) María vive con algún que otro estudiante.
María lives with ALGUN QUE OTRO student
(Maria lives with students --- I don't know how many.)
