Bare plurals and indefinite determiners Spanish unos

Bare plurals and indefinite determinersSpanish unos

CHALLENGE 1

Facts

Spanish unos doesn’t allow for proportional readings.

?Unos estudiantes son abogados. unos students are lawyers

Intended: ‘Some students are lawyers.’

?UNOS estudiantes son abogados. UNOS students are lawyers

Intended: ‘Some students are lawyers.’

I take unos...otros to be a fixed expression (see also Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001 and Martí 2007).

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Previous analyses

Why is it that unos behaves in this way ?

What is it that makes unos special compared to other determiners ?

Previous analyses



Martí 2007

Syntactic / semantic decomposition of indefinites

- number- existential quantification- positive polarity- partitivity implicature

unos algunos

Claim:

Alg- adds the partitivity implicature. Unos lacks alg- and therefore does not give rise to partitive readings.

Previous analyses



Martí 2007

Question that remains:

Why is unos the only determiner that needs alg- to get a partitive reading ?

Dos estudiantes son abogados.ok

Algodos estudiantes son abogados.*

-> Back to where we were...

Previous analyses



My analysis



Unos is the default plural indefinite determiner in Spanish.

Unos is the indefinite plural article in Spanish.

-> in as far as indefinite articles are grammaticalized markers of argumenthood they are expected not to give rise to derived interpretations (such as the partitive one)

Parallel with the singular indefinite article:

? A student is a lawyer.

Argumentation

-> in as far as indefinite articles are grammaticalized markers of argumenthood they are expected not to give rise to derived interpretations (such as the partitive one)

Can we show that unos underwent a grammaticalization process comparable to that of an indefinite article ?

-> what does the grammaticalization process of an indefinite article look like ?

-> what predictions does this make for unos ?

-> are these predictions borne out ?

Argumentation

1. The indefinite article loses part of its semantic content

-> partitive reading possibleOne student came to see me.1

-> partitive reading impossibleA student came to see me.

Prediction: unos did allow for partitive readings in Early Spanish.

plausible but not checked1

Argumentation


Following Gutiérrez-Rexach (2001) I assume non-partitive Ds cannot appear in the upstairs D position of (standard) partitives.

Present day Spanish:

??? He visto a unos de los familiares de Pedro. have seen a some of the relatives of PedroIntended: ‘I saw some of Pedro’s relatives.’

Early Spanish:

E ellas yendo se, fueron unos de los guardadores a la ciudat.And they going went unos of the guards to the city‘And while they were going, some of the guards went to the city.’

< manuscrito escurialense I.I.6. (between 1254 and 1270)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Symbol_OK.svg

Argumentation

2. The indefinite article, in the beginning of its grammaticalization process, is used to mark the introduction of salient discourse referents (cf. Givón 1981, Stark 2002, Blazer 1979).

Corpus study: El Cid (late 12th early 13th century)

verse 1-500 (approx. 3900 words)

# bare singulars: approx. 150

# bare singular objects: approx. 31

-> look at bare singulars

Argumentation

objects in epitetha 5

‘fixed’ expressions

dar salto ‘to attack’ 2 still attested

aver miedo ‘to be scared’ 1 still attested

aver menester ‘to need’ 1 still attested

aver gracia ‘to have grace’ 1 still attested

mass objects 3

meter mano ‘to touch/grab’ 1 still attested

Argumentation

object of verb in subjuntivo 3

object of verb in future 4

object of verb in imperative 3

object of infinitive following ‘want to’ 2

object in generalization 1

discourse referents do not correspond to something in reality (and could thus be said to be less salient)

Prediction: bare plurals, at some moment in time, could only be used to introduce discourse referents that do not correspond to something in reality.

Argumentation


Corpus study: El Cid

-> look at bare plurals

verse 1-500 (approx. 3900 words)

# bare plurals: approx. 54

# bare plural objects: approx. 6

?

Argumentation

3. Important gain in frequency of the indefinite article

El Cid

late 12th early 13th century 1605

El Quijote

verse 1-500 (approx. 3900 words) Part I, CH 2 (approx. 2200 words)

approx. 650 NPs approx. 420 NPs

% bare singulars % bare singulars

% indefinite singular % indefinite singular

23 14

3 5

Argumentation

un

Prediction: important gain in frequency for unos.

Corpus del Español, Mark Davies

Argumentation

El Cid

late 12th early 13th century 1605

El Quijote

verse 1-500 (approx. 3900 words) Part I, CH 2 (approx. 2200 words)

approx. 650 NPs approx. 420 NPs

% bare plurals % bare plurals

% indefinite plural % indefinite plural

8 4

0 1


Argumentation

unos


Summary



un unos

+

+ a quick browse through attested examples of unos + ‘of’ + ‘the’ seems to indicate that unos lost its partitive potential around the same time.

+ unos is parallel to the indefinite article in not allowing partitive readings

Unos seems to function as a plural indefinite article.

Summary


?

+ Spanish allows for bare plurals...

Unos doesn’t seem to be the perfect match of the singular indefinite article.

CHALLENGE 2

Facts + previous analysis

Al principio, Juan quería restaurar muebles, At_the beginning Juan wanted restore pieces_of_furniture

pero terminó vendiéndolos. but ended_up selling_them

‘In the beginning, Juan wanted to restore pieces of furniture, but he ended up selling them.’

Claim by Laca (1996, 1999): bare plurals do not introduce standard discourse referents, they refer to kinds.

More facts

En la fabricación hubo problemas técnicos in the production there_were problems technical

uno de ellos era la construcción de la torre. one of them was the construction of the tower

‘In the production there were technical problems, one of them was the construction of the tower.’

¿contra ? Laca

My analysis

- bare plurals introduce discourse referents

- accommodation mechanism used by de Swart & Farkas (2003)

-> bare plurals are not the standard choice to introduce discourse referents

-> they are only used to introduce discourse referents that are not likely to be picked in later discourse

If this analysis makes sense it would:

-> account for Laca’s intuition

-> account for the corpus facts

What are the predictions ?

-> leave for unos the role of indefinite plural article (being the standard default det to introduce DRs)

My analysis


1. Unos being the marked option will:

- be dispreferred to introduce discourse referents that we know are less likely to be picked up in later discourse

- cannot introduce discourse referents that we know cannot be picked up in later discourse

object of verb in subjuntivo

object of verb in future

object of verb in imperative

object of infinitive following ‘want to’

object in generalization

cf. supra

object in scope of negation (unos is a PPI)

My analysis


2. Bare plurals only allowing for the introduction of non-salient discourse referents:

-> will be disallowed in ‘salient’ environments

By assumption the preverbal subject position is such environment.

Políticos han ocupado el palacio.Politicians have occupied the palace.

*

The bigger picture

The bare plural in Spanish is used to introduce discourse referents that are not likely to be picked up.

Unos functions as the default determiner that is used to introduce plural discourse referents that are likely to be picked up...... This boils down to saying that unos is the plural indefinite article.

The difference between the singular and the plural indefinite article...

... resides in the fact that the bare singular doesn’t allow for accommodation and does not constitute a competitor for the singular indefinite article.

Loose ends

The exact grammaticalization process of unos needs further study.

Unos is not only famous for its lack of partitive readings but also for its group readings. How does this connect to my analysis ?

A tentative OT analysis

Constraints

*ART: don’t use articlesFSAL: mark salience

Qx(Salient(x)&P(x)&Q(x))

noun

unos noun

Qx(P(x)&Q(x))

noun

unos noun

FSAL *ART

*

*

*

A brief look at des

French des

The meaning of des

DP

NumP

PP

DPP

Num

D

NPD

hommesles

dedes

PL

Default way to proceed: accommodation (cf. de Swart & Farkas 2003)

Coercion way: move further to D.

-> wide-scope readings and partitive readings

French des

-> being standardly <e,t> it is equivalent to a bare plural

-> it is therefore expected that there cannot be a bare plural and des N in French

-> only competitor is de in the scope of negation

The End

Documents

Bare plurals and indefinite determiners Spanish unos