marta donazzan | University of Cologne (original) (raw)
Papers by marta donazzan
Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 2008
The paper presents an analysis of event repetition as a manifestation of additivity in the ordere... more The paper presents an analysis of event repetition as a manifestation of additivity in the ordered domain of events. A collection of iterative and aspectual adverbs belonging to different languages, such as English 'again', French 'encore' of Mandarin 'zai', can so receive a unified semantic analysis and be characterised as additive particles whose presupposition displays properties which are sensitive to the structural properties of the predicate, and which, in many cases, are predictable from the different syntactic positions where the adverbs occur. The content of the presupposition is computed via a conditional higher order equation. This solution makes room for two types of variation, i) in the heuristics a language may use for selecting material from the asserted clause, and ii) in the consequences of satisfying vs. accommodating a presupposition.
Esse artigo discute a relacao entre sintaxe e semântica em estruturas causativas e se concentra n... more Esse artigo discute a relacao entre sintaxe e semântica em estruturas causativas e se concentra no exemplo oferecido pelas construcoes causativas no italiano. O italiano exibe dois tipos de construcoes causativas (as chamadas construcoes faire-par e faire-infinitivo), que tem sido o tema de uma extensa investigacao na literatura. Argumento que, para capturar as similaridades e as diferencas semânticas entre esses dois tipos de construcoes sintaticas no italiano, e necessario relacionar suas propriedades com a estrutura causativa subjacente que elas expressam. Essa abordagem nos leva a rejeitar propostas anteriores que distinguem dois tipos estruturais com base em propriedades selecionais do primeiro verbo causativo. Uma abordagem em termos de alternância de Voz e assumida e apresento novas evidencias empiricas para essa abordagem, retiradas da comparacao com outras construcoes causativas no italiano e da discussao da alternância transitivo/anticausativo em oracoes infinitivas.
Additive particles convey the meaning that the element they associate with (which we will call, f... more Additive particles convey the meaning that the element they associate with (which we will call, following Krifka 1998, their associate) is to be understood as added to a preexisting non-empty set of alternatives: in this sense, they introduce the presupposition of the existence of at least one alternative to their associate. Scalar additive particles are said to be a subset of additive particles (König 1991), in that they have in common the same existential presupposition as part of their semantic meaning but they differ in the way the set of alternatives is construed and, consequently, recovered by speakers: while bare additive particles do not give constraints on the structure of the presupposed set, scalar additive particles are assumed to impose an ordering on the set, facilitating accommodation by inference also out of context (Fauconnier 1976). Anyway, as König (1991) pointed out in a comparative perspective, in many languages additive scalar particles are not always independe...
To cite this version: Marta Donazzan, Alexandru Mardale. Additive and aspectual adverbs: towards ... more To cite this version: Marta Donazzan, Alexandru Mardale. Additive and aspectual adverbs: towards an analysis of romanian MAI. Revue roumaine de linguistique, Bucureşti : Ed. Academiei Române, 1990Române, -, 2010 ADDITIVE AND ASPECTUAL ADVERBS: TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN MAI MARTA DONAZZAN, ALEXANDRU MARDALE Abstract. This paper is concerned with the semantics of the Romanian adverb mai in its occurrence as a VP-modifier. We propose that mai has the core meaning of an additive particle whose argument is a predicate of events. Following this monosemic analysis, we are able to explain the different interpretations of mai (its continuative, iterative and 'experiential' readings) by considering the aspectual information of the sentence and the structural properties of the predicate. Our claim is also supported by a comparison with additive and aspectual adverbs in Italian.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory
The Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2017
This paper discusses occurrences of Italian sapere ‘know’ in mental state attributions (sa). Foll... more This paper discusses occurrences of Italian sapere ‘know’ in mental state attributions (sa). Following the proposal of Tsohatzidis (2012) for ‘knows’, the hypothesis put forward is that sa, when used in mental state attributions, is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense: when sa is used in its factive sense, a sentence such as X sa che p ‘X sa that p’ entails p, whereas, when sa is used in its non-factive sense, a sentence having the same surface form does not entail p. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some tests traditionally used to ascertain cases of lexical ambiguity. Moreover, it will be shown that there are syntactic environments where only one of the two readings is allowed, which also seems to confirm the hypothesis that there are two sa, a factive one and a non-factive one, which select different structures. (Less)
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 2019
Mandarin adverb hai allows for two main interpretations when associated with gradable properties.... more Mandarin adverb hai allows for two main interpretations when associated with gradable properties. Descriptive work usually discriminate between ‘temporal’ and ‘comparative’ readings of hai, while the semantic core of the adverb has been defined in terms of scalarity. In this paper, our purpose is to give an understanding of the topic by providing the basis for an analysis of the adverb at the syntax-semantics interface. While subscribing to the generalization that hai is restricted to ordered domains, we will propose to characterize the adverb as a repetitive operator, that is, an additive operator the event domain; we will show that the possibility for hai to associate to gradable properties in comparative constructions can be explained on the bases of its repetitive use.
'Nomina vicis' are nouns that denote in a domain of acts, free from considerations of tem... more 'Nomina vicis' are nouns that denote in a domain of acts, free from considerations of temporal localisation. This paper tries to substantiate this notion by looking at Italian -ata event nouns, and deriving features of this reading from characteristics of these nominalisations. Event nouns ending in -ata are simple event nouns with no argument structure and yet they are endowed with the capacity of characterising an act, which is a dynamic, durative and bounded manifestation of an event property, and of affecting the full expression of such a characterisation when the noun is inserted in argumental position or under a light verb. A detailed examination of the semantic trace of an initiator within the nominalisation, and of aspectual and eventive conditions associated with it leads us to propose that the -ata suffix contributes an active semantic constraint on potential external arguments that, in turn, supports the eventive only and referential only reading of the nominal.
This paper discusses the issue of the ontology of the verbal domain with respect to empirical phe... more This paper discusses the issue of the ontology of the verbal domain with respect to empirical phenomena related to countability. I will take up the issue by discussing in particular the case of Mandarin Chinese, a language that has a specific functional category for counting in the verbal domain, the category of Verbal Classifiers (VCls, Paris (2011, 1981); Fassi Fehri and Vinet (2008), among others). I will show that verbal classifiers, as event counters, cannot be conflated with durative modifiers, which have the function of bounding the predicate by imposing a measure unit. Rather, VCls are functional devices which act as classifiers of verbal predicates that single out and count the individuals in the denotation of the VP.
Nella letteratura linguistica degli ultimi trent’anni, ed in particolare nell’ambito degli studi ... more Nella letteratura linguistica degli ultimi trent’anni, ed in particolare nell’ambito degli studi di sintassi e semantica formale, il cinese mandarino è assurto a paradigma delle lingue senza Tempo, prive del tratto morfosintattico (in inglese: Tense) volto ad esprimere l’informazione temporale, ovvero la categoria semantica del tempo (Li, Thompson 1981; Gōng 1991; Klein, Li, Hendriks 2000; Mei 2002; Lin 2006). Come evidenziato dagli esempi (1) e (2), il cinese non possiede alcun morfema che corrisponda al tempo verbale, una caratteristica che lo differenzia dalle langue indoeuropee. La frase (1a) contrasta con (1b), in italiano, relativamente al tempo verbale della copula essere, che localizza la predicazione dello stato di essere felice rispettivamente nel presente e nel passato rispetto al momento di enunciazione. Il contrasto tra tempo passato e presente non è visibile in cinese, in quanto il predicato hĕn gāoxìng, nell’esempio (2), non presenta alcun morfema dedicato all’espress...
The Mandarin Chinese adverb ZAI, in its adverbial use, displays a number of peculiarities--concer... more The Mandarin Chinese adverb ZAI, in its adverbial use, displays a number of peculiarities--concerning the temporal orientation of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the syntactic/logical role of the sentence where it occurs--which, as a whole, have been subsumed under the feature 'irrealis'. In this paper, we consider ZAI as an additive particle in the domain of events and we propose to derive its 'irrealis' flavour from constraints on the structure and temporal location of the asserted event. As an additive particle, ZAI conveys a presupposition which cannot be recovered indipendently from the context of occurrence.
Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 2008
The paper presents an analysis of event repetition as a manifestation of additivity in the ordere... more The paper presents an analysis of event repetition as a manifestation of additivity in the ordered domain of events. A collection of iterative and aspectual adverbs belonging to different languages, such as English 'again', French 'encore' of Mandarin 'zai', can so receive a unified semantic analysis and be characterised as additive particles whose presupposition displays properties which are sensitive to the structural properties of the predicate, and which, in many cases, are predictable from the different syntactic positions where the adverbs occur. The content of the presupposition is computed via a conditional higher order equation. This solution makes room for two types of variation, i) in the heuristics a language may use for selecting material from the asserted clause, and ii) in the consequences of satisfying vs. accommodating a presupposition.
Esse artigo discute a relacao entre sintaxe e semântica em estruturas causativas e se concentra n... more Esse artigo discute a relacao entre sintaxe e semântica em estruturas causativas e se concentra no exemplo oferecido pelas construcoes causativas no italiano. O italiano exibe dois tipos de construcoes causativas (as chamadas construcoes faire-par e faire-infinitivo), que tem sido o tema de uma extensa investigacao na literatura. Argumento que, para capturar as similaridades e as diferencas semânticas entre esses dois tipos de construcoes sintaticas no italiano, e necessario relacionar suas propriedades com a estrutura causativa subjacente que elas expressam. Essa abordagem nos leva a rejeitar propostas anteriores que distinguem dois tipos estruturais com base em propriedades selecionais do primeiro verbo causativo. Uma abordagem em termos de alternância de Voz e assumida e apresento novas evidencias empiricas para essa abordagem, retiradas da comparacao com outras construcoes causativas no italiano e da discussao da alternância transitivo/anticausativo em oracoes infinitivas.
Additive particles convey the meaning that the element they associate with (which we will call, f... more Additive particles convey the meaning that the element they associate with (which we will call, following Krifka 1998, their associate) is to be understood as added to a preexisting non-empty set of alternatives: in this sense, they introduce the presupposition of the existence of at least one alternative to their associate. Scalar additive particles are said to be a subset of additive particles (König 1991), in that they have in common the same existential presupposition as part of their semantic meaning but they differ in the way the set of alternatives is construed and, consequently, recovered by speakers: while bare additive particles do not give constraints on the structure of the presupposed set, scalar additive particles are assumed to impose an ordering on the set, facilitating accommodation by inference also out of context (Fauconnier 1976). Anyway, as König (1991) pointed out in a comparative perspective, in many languages additive scalar particles are not always independe...
To cite this version: Marta Donazzan, Alexandru Mardale. Additive and aspectual adverbs: towards ... more To cite this version: Marta Donazzan, Alexandru Mardale. Additive and aspectual adverbs: towards an analysis of romanian MAI. Revue roumaine de linguistique, Bucureşti : Ed. Academiei Române, 1990Române, -, 2010 ADDITIVE AND ASPECTUAL ADVERBS: TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN MAI MARTA DONAZZAN, ALEXANDRU MARDALE Abstract. This paper is concerned with the semantics of the Romanian adverb mai in its occurrence as a VP-modifier. We propose that mai has the core meaning of an additive particle whose argument is a predicate of events. Following this monosemic analysis, we are able to explain the different interpretations of mai (its continuative, iterative and 'experiential' readings) by considering the aspectual information of the sentence and the structural properties of the predicate. Our claim is also supported by a comparison with additive and aspectual adverbs in Italian.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory
The Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2017
This paper discusses occurrences of Italian sapere ‘know’ in mental state attributions (sa). Foll... more This paper discusses occurrences of Italian sapere ‘know’ in mental state attributions (sa). Following the proposal of Tsohatzidis (2012) for ‘knows’, the hypothesis put forward is that sa, when used in mental state attributions, is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense: when sa is used in its factive sense, a sentence such as X sa che p ‘X sa that p’ entails p, whereas, when sa is used in its non-factive sense, a sentence having the same surface form does not entail p. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some tests traditionally used to ascertain cases of lexical ambiguity. Moreover, it will be shown that there are syntactic environments where only one of the two readings is allowed, which also seems to confirm the hypothesis that there are two sa, a factive one and a non-factive one, which select different structures. (Less)
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 2019
Mandarin adverb hai allows for two main interpretations when associated with gradable properties.... more Mandarin adverb hai allows for two main interpretations when associated with gradable properties. Descriptive work usually discriminate between ‘temporal’ and ‘comparative’ readings of hai, while the semantic core of the adverb has been defined in terms of scalarity. In this paper, our purpose is to give an understanding of the topic by providing the basis for an analysis of the adverb at the syntax-semantics interface. While subscribing to the generalization that hai is restricted to ordered domains, we will propose to characterize the adverb as a repetitive operator, that is, an additive operator the event domain; we will show that the possibility for hai to associate to gradable properties in comparative constructions can be explained on the bases of its repetitive use.
'Nomina vicis' are nouns that denote in a domain of acts, free from considerations of tem... more 'Nomina vicis' are nouns that denote in a domain of acts, free from considerations of temporal localisation. This paper tries to substantiate this notion by looking at Italian -ata event nouns, and deriving features of this reading from characteristics of these nominalisations. Event nouns ending in -ata are simple event nouns with no argument structure and yet they are endowed with the capacity of characterising an act, which is a dynamic, durative and bounded manifestation of an event property, and of affecting the full expression of such a characterisation when the noun is inserted in argumental position or under a light verb. A detailed examination of the semantic trace of an initiator within the nominalisation, and of aspectual and eventive conditions associated with it leads us to propose that the -ata suffix contributes an active semantic constraint on potential external arguments that, in turn, supports the eventive only and referential only reading of the nominal.
This paper discusses the issue of the ontology of the verbal domain with respect to empirical phe... more This paper discusses the issue of the ontology of the verbal domain with respect to empirical phenomena related to countability. I will take up the issue by discussing in particular the case of Mandarin Chinese, a language that has a specific functional category for counting in the verbal domain, the category of Verbal Classifiers (VCls, Paris (2011, 1981); Fassi Fehri and Vinet (2008), among others). I will show that verbal classifiers, as event counters, cannot be conflated with durative modifiers, which have the function of bounding the predicate by imposing a measure unit. Rather, VCls are functional devices which act as classifiers of verbal predicates that single out and count the individuals in the denotation of the VP.
Nella letteratura linguistica degli ultimi trent’anni, ed in particolare nell’ambito degli studi ... more Nella letteratura linguistica degli ultimi trent’anni, ed in particolare nell’ambito degli studi di sintassi e semantica formale, il cinese mandarino è assurto a paradigma delle lingue senza Tempo, prive del tratto morfosintattico (in inglese: Tense) volto ad esprimere l’informazione temporale, ovvero la categoria semantica del tempo (Li, Thompson 1981; Gōng 1991; Klein, Li, Hendriks 2000; Mei 2002; Lin 2006). Come evidenziato dagli esempi (1) e (2), il cinese non possiede alcun morfema che corrisponda al tempo verbale, una caratteristica che lo differenzia dalle langue indoeuropee. La frase (1a) contrasta con (1b), in italiano, relativamente al tempo verbale della copula essere, che localizza la predicazione dello stato di essere felice rispettivamente nel presente e nel passato rispetto al momento di enunciazione. Il contrasto tra tempo passato e presente non è visibile in cinese, in quanto il predicato hĕn gāoxìng, nell’esempio (2), non presenta alcun morfema dedicato all’espress...
The Mandarin Chinese adverb ZAI, in its adverbial use, displays a number of peculiarities--concer... more The Mandarin Chinese adverb ZAI, in its adverbial use, displays a number of peculiarities--concerning the temporal orientation of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the syntactic/logical role of the sentence where it occurs--which, as a whole, have been subsumed under the feature 'irrealis'. In this paper, we consider ZAI as an additive particle in the domain of events and we propose to derive its 'irrealis' flavour from constraints on the structure and temporal location of the asserted event. As an additive particle, ZAI conveys a presupposition which cannot be recovered indipendently from the context of occurrence.