Abstract for Jeroen van Craenenbroeck's talk

About something: towards a syntactic decomposition of polarity
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (University College Brussels)
November 25, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this talk I focus on the dialect Dutch construction illustrated in (1).

(1) Moeten we voor die cursus iets van boek lezen?
must we for that course something of book read
'Do we have to read {any book/some book or other} for this course?'

In this example, the direct object of the verb lezen 'to read' consists of the existential quantifier iets 'something', the preposition van 'of' and the determinerless singular count noun boek 'book'. It means 'any book' or 'some book or other'. I show that this DP behaves very differently from more run-of-the-mill PP-containing DPs, not in the least because it is polarity sensitive. I propose an account for this construction that tries to capture not only its specific syntactic properties, but also its polarity sensitivity. Furthermore, I try to extend this decompositional analysis to any and its Dutch equivalent enig.