Abstract for Tonia Bleam's talk

On the status of null determiners
Tonia Bleam (University of Maryland)
September 21, 2006 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - 6:00 PM; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

In Spanish, bare nominals are restricted in their distribution, for the most part being relegated to VP-internal positions. Previous proposals to account for this restriction appeal to a null determiner that must be syntactically licensed (Contreras, Longobardi, Chierchia 1998). These analyses presuppose some version of what I will call the "Strong Fregean Mapping Hypothesis" (the idea that semantic combination takes place only via function application and that syntactic arguments of (transitive) verbs must be entity-denoting). In this talk, I show that allowing more freedom in the semantic type of syntactic arguments, in combination with a theory of information structure, allows us to better account for the distribution of bare nominals in Spanish without recourse to null determiners.