In Emmon Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer & Barbara Partee (eds.), Quantification in Natural Languages. Kluwer (1995)
|Abstract||In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one,two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, eg. child. We also argue that Warlpiri has no articles or any other items of the syntactic category D(eterminer). In section 2, we describe three types of readings— "definite", "indefinite" and "predicative"—which are generally found with Warlpiri nouns, including those which correspond to English common nouns and cardinality expressions. A partial analysis of these readings is sketched i n section 3. Since Warlpiri has no determiner system, we hypothesize that the source of (in)definiteness in this language is semantic. More specifically, we suggest that Warlpiri nominals are basically interpreted as individual terms or predicates of individuals and that their three readings arise as a consequence of the interaction of their basic meanings, which are specific to Warlpiri, with certain semantic operations, such as type shifting (Rooth and Partee 1982, Partee and Rooth 1983, Partee 1986, 1987), which universally can or must apply in the process of compositional semantic interpretation|
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Through your library||Configure|
Similar books and articles
Miriam Corris, Christopher Manning, Susan Poetsch & Jane Simpson, Bilingual Dictionaries for Australian Languages: User Studies on the Place of Paper and Electronic Dictionaries.
Maria Bittner (1994). Cross-Linguistic Semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (1):53 - 108.
Maria Bittner (1998). Cross-Linguistic Semantics for Questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (1):1-82.
Brian Butterworth & Robert Reeve (2008). Verbal Counting and Spatial Strategies in Numerical Tasks: Evidence From Indigenous Australia. Philosophical Psychology 21 (4):443 – 457.
Maria Bittner & Ken Hale (2000). Comparative Notes On Ergative Case Systems. In Robert Pensalfini & Norvin Richards (eds.), MITWPEL 2: Papers on Australian Languages. Dep. Linguistics, MIT.
Paul Faulstich (1998). Mapping the Mythological Landscape: An Aboriginal Way of Being-in-the- World. Philosophy and Geography 1 (2):197 – 221.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads7 ( #134,900 of 556,837 )
Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,847 of 556,837 )
How can I increase my downloads?