Norwegian Bare Singulars Kaja Borthen [email protected] A thesis submitted to Norwegian University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor Artium. April, 2003 Department of language and communication studies Til Ingar og Isak 2 Table of contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 6 Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... 8 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 10 1.1 Main question and goal ............................................................................................ 10 1.2 Definition of bare singulars...................................................................................... 10 1.3 Limitations w.r.t. empirical domain......................................................................... 17 1.4 Methodological issues.............................................................................................. 18 1.5 Notation conventions................................................................................................18 1.6 An outline of the thesis............................................................................................. 19 2 Some semantic properties.............................................................................................. 22 2.1 The type- and token-level of reference .................................................................... 22 2.2 Existential interpretations and scope behavior......................................................... 24 2.3 Referentiality............................................................................................................ 25 2.4 Partitivity.................................................................................................................. 29 2.5 Genericity................................................................................................................. 30 2.6 Comparatives............................................................................................................ 32 2.7 The weak/strong distinction ..................................................................................... 34 2.8 Antecedenthood........................................................................................................ 36 2.8.1 Antecedents of token-anaphors in extensional contexts .................................. 36 2.8.2 Antecedents of token-anaphors in intensional contexts ................................... 39 2.8.3 Antecedents of the type anaphor 'det'............................................................... 40 2.9 Cognitive status........................................................................................................ 42 2.10 Topicality ................................................................................................................. 46 2.10.1 Sentence topics................................................................................................. 46 2.10.2 Discourse topics............................................................................................... 48 2.11 Lexical restrictions................................................................................................... 49 2.12 Summing up: Norwegian bare singulars are type-emphasizing............................... 50 2.13 Appendix: Bare plurals and bare mass expressions ................................................. 55 3 Some syntactic properties.............................................................................................. 59 3.1 Noun phrase-internal structure................................................................................. 59 3.2 Distribution in different syntactic positions............................................................. 60 3.2.1 Subjects ............................................................................................................ 60 3.2.2 Objects.............................................................................................................. 61 3.2.3 Predicatives ...................................................................................................... 62 3.3 Word order and syntactic alternations...................................................................... 63 3.4 Agreement ................................................................................................................ 66 3.5 Summary .................................................................................................................. 68 4 Prior research .................................................................................................................69 4.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 69 4.2 Prior research on the distribution pattern of Norwegian bare singulars................... 69 4.2.1 Argumenthood and the NP/DP distinction....................................................... 69 4.2.2 The weak/strong distinction ............................................................................. 71 4.2.3 Mass expressions or part of idioms.................................................................. 74 4.2.4 Semantic roles.................................................................................................. 77 4.2.5 The descriptive linguistic tradition................................................................... 80 4.3 Prior research on agreement properties of Norwegian bare singulars ..................... 92 3 4.4 Prior research on reduced indefinites in some other languages ............................... 94 4.4.1 Danish bare singulars....................................................................................... 94 4.4.2 Hungarian bare singulars.................................................................................. 96 4.4.3 West Greenlandic incorporated nouns ........................................................... 100 4.4.4 Bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese .......................................................... 102 4.5 Summary and conclusions...................................................................................... 105 4.5.1 No fully satisfactory account.......................................................................... 105 4.5.2 Summary of data observations made for Norwegian bare singulars.............. 105 4.5.3 Commonalities between reduced indefinites in different languages.............. 107 4.5.4 Recurring topics and notions in the previous literature.................................. 108 5 Hypothesis..................................................................................................................... 112 5.1 Type-emphasis not enough..................................................................................... 112 5.2 Hypothesis: a set of bare singular-licensing constructions .................................... 115 6 Construction 1 .............................................................................................................. 116 6.1 Rejecting the relevance of the predicative/non-predicative distinction ................. 116 6.2 The 'conventional situation type'-construction....................................................... 125 6.2.1 The construction definition (first version) ..................................................... 125 6.2.2 Contextual implications.................................................................................. 126 6.3 Some resolved puzzles ........................................................................................... 128 6.3.1 Explanations for the data in section 6.1 ......................................................... 128 6.3.2 Different denotations of predicative and non-predicative bare singulars ...... 129 6.3.3 The effect of presuppositional contexts ......................................................... 130 6.3.4 Possible effects of subjects............................................................................. 132 6.3.5 Why adjectives are sometimes necessary....................................................... 134 6.3.6 Why deverbal nominals are particularly acceptable ...................................... 134 6.4 Syntactic properties................................................................................................ 135 6.4.1 Lack of adjacency........................................................................................... 135 6.4.2 Bare singulars in prepositional phrases.......................................................... 136 6.4.3 Bare singulars in existential sentences........................................................... 138 6.4.4 Indirect objects............................................................................................... 139 6.4.5 Subjects .......................................................................................................... 140 6.5 More data................................................................................................................ 141 6.5.1 Multi-word expressions with bare singulars .................................................. 142 6.5.2 Information structure.....................................................................................