Colloque International

Determiners: reference and degrees of knowledge
Déterminants : référence et degrés de connaissance


Date and place/Date et Lieu

5 mai 2010

Université Paris VII
UFR Linguistique
30, rue du Château des Rentiers
75013 Paris 13ème
salle 134, 1er étage

Program/Programme

9h10 Accueil
9h15 - 10h15 Christiane Marchello-Nizia
Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon

De -moult fort- à -tres fort- : le processus de changement des marqueurs d'intensité en français comme type d'évolution du système
Pause café
10h30 - 11h30 Julia Pozas Loyo
Queen Mary, University of London

From Numeral to Indefinite Marker: the Evolution of Spanish -un-
11h30 - 12h30 Johan van der Auwera et Lauren van Alsenoy
Universiteit Antwerpen		 Mapping the West Germanic any's
Pause déjeuner
14h15 - 15h15 Angelika Port
University of Amsterdam, ILLC		 -Irgend- -indefinites and Specificity
15h15- 16h15 Yoonhee Choi
Université Paris VII		 A comparative study of methods for computing free choice
Pause café
16h30 - 17h30 Donka Farkas
University of California Santa Cruz		 Specifiers and Anti-specifiers

Abstracts/Résumés

Christiane Marchello-Nizia, De moult fort à tres fort : le processus de changement des marqueurs d'intensité en français comme type d'évolution du système.
Un changement exemplaire en français concerne la disparition du quantifieur-intensifieur roman moult. A l'origine variable dans certains de ses emplois, il a été remplacé par deux morphèmes, très et beaucoup, invariables et s'opposant par la portée. Cette évolution s'est faite sur plusieurs siècles : entamée au 12e s., elle s'achève au 16e s. Nous présenterons la première étape de ce changement, qui concerne très : nous exposerons dans quels emplois et quelles constructions la concurrence s'amorce, et nous proposerons une explication diachronique à ce type de substitution.
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Julia Pozas Loyo, From Numeral to Indefinite Marker: the Evolution of Spanish -un
It is a well-known fact that unitary cardinals often become markers for singular-indefinite nouns. This phenomenon can be attested in Germanic, Romance, Mandarin, Hungarian, Neo-Aramaic, Persian, Turkish, Creoles and various Amerindian and Austronesian languages, among others. This paper is a quantitative diachronic study of the development of Spanish un, from its cardinal value to its use as an indefinite article. Based on a corpus comprising texts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, I present an analysis and chronology of the main changes undergone by un(os) throughout this period, notably its increasing use as a marker of non-specific indefinites, and its further incorporation in generic noun phrases and predicates.
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Johan van der Auwera et Lauren Van Alsenoy, Mapping the West Germanic any's.
As different from English 'any', its etymological counterparts in the other West Germanic languages have received much less attention, and yet they are no less interesting. All these items started as negative polarity items in Old West Germanic, but they developed in different directions at a different speed. In this talk we offer a comparative analysis, focusing on their semantic development. We will make a critical use of Haspelmath's (1997) typology of indefinites and of the Aristotelian Square of Oppositions.
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Angelika Port, Irgend-indefinites and Specificity.
First I will present the results of a synchronic corpus study of the irgend-indefinites and their distribution on the implicational map of Haspelmath (1997). In the second part I will concentrate on the specific area using the framework of Conceptual Covers (Aloni, 2001) and show how we can account for the two notions associated with specificity: knowing who vs. having someone in mind.
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Yoonhee Choi, A comparative study of methods for computing free choice.
In this talk, I present an overview of the previous studies on methods for computing Free Choice, concentrating on Kadmon and Landman (1993), Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), Chierchia (2006), Aloni and van Rooij (2005) and Jayez and Tovena (2005), and discuss if each case can be extended to the FCIs in Korean or French which are relatively multiform.
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Donka Farkas, Specifiers and Anti-specifiers.
In the first part of the paper, a distinction is proposed between special Ds that render the reference of the DP more 'specific' in some sense (the specifiers) and special Ds that render it less so (the anti-specifiers). The rest of the paper discusses dependent indefinites (as examples of specifiers) and 'a certain' and 'this' indefinites (as examples of anti-specifiers). The common denominator of these two classes of Ds is argued to be variation vs. stability of reference across alternatives. The difference has to do with what alternatives are considered.
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