Jon Gajewski (UConn) will give the department colloquium on Friday, November 22, at 3:30 in Machmer E-32. A title and abstract follow.
NPIs in definite descriptions
This talk will examine in detail the issue of licensing negative polarity items in the restrictors of definite descriptions. According to a somewhat standard view (Lahiri 1998, Cable 2003, Guerzoni & Sharvit 2007), (i) NPIs such as 'any' and 'ever' are licensed in plural definite descriptions and not in singular definite descriptions and (ii) this can be explained using Strawson entailment and a slight modification of the downward entailing analysis of NPI licensing. Questions have been raised both for the utility of Strawson entailment in licensing (Homer 2010) and for the empirical generalization about number (Hoeksema 2008, Rothschild 2009). Cases of licensing in singular definites and failure to license in plural definites have been discussed. In this talk I will argue that to arrive at a better analysis of licensing in definites, more attention must be paid to the compositional structure of the relevant examples. In particular, we must identify what is responsible for licensing - the definite article itself, the environment in which the definite occurs (argumental, predicative, distributive/collective) or some combination.
