Abstract:

This book is the published version of the author's PhD thesis for the Saarland University (cf. Curriculum Vitae). The study, written in English, presents a comprehensive treatment of determination based on English, Italian and other Germanic or Romance languages: also data from Danish, French, German and Spanish are taken into account. Here the notion of determination concerns 1) the occurrence of determiners, understood as those dependents of a nominal head that determine the type of reference for the Noun Phrase, and 2) their absence in case of self-determining nominal items like proper names, pronouns, bare plurals. The author's empirical investigation identifies a rich assortment of determiners, covering the article as well as demonstrative, possessive, quantitative, cardinal and ordinal determiners; besides their specific semantic contribution, they can differ in terms of distributional class – i.e. predeterminer, central determiner or postdeterminer – and other morphosyntactic properties. Thus it is argued that there are no adequate morphosyntactic definitions for a 'part of speech' with precisely the same coverage as the repertory of dependents which express the relevant typology of semantic information. Rejecting the DP Hypothesis currently popular among linguists, articles are shown to be categorially 'minor' particles without syntactic projection, while the other determiners belong to such 'major categories' as Adjective and Noun/Pronoun.

The general approach of the study is sign-based, as syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of words or phrases are treated in parallel through a nontransformational grammar with logical constraints. In particular, the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar by Pollard and Sag (1994) is adopted as a starting point, but also revised by modelling all head-selecting dependents uniformly according to a notion of functors which simplifies the X-bar Theory of HPSG: specifiers are bar-changing functors and adjuncts are bar-preserving functors. Under such a functor treatment, developing earlier work by the author (Allegranza 1998a and 1998b), determiners 'mark' the mother node of the nominal constructions where they occur as specifiers or adjuncts, so that co-occurrence restrictions on multiple determiners for the same Noun Phrase result from adequately setting and checking the marking values. Since all determiners are characterized by a particular semantic import, which may be called range of reference, the book includes a broad discussion of this issue, drawing upon the mainstream of logical semantics (especially Generalized Quantifier Theory) while taking into account cognitive and pragmatic aspects too. In relation to the syntax-semantics interface of HPSG, its 'quantifier storage' system is reworked so as to achieve radically lexicalist solutions for problems of quantifier scope ambiguity.

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Last modified: November 2007