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The semantics, syntax, and morphology of Transparent Free Relatives revisited; a comparison of two approaches

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Abstract

This article proposes to go beyond the earlier literature on Transparent Free Relatives (TFRs) by pursuing three interrelated goals:

(i) To provide a sharper descriptive and analytical characterization of the semantic and pragmatic distinctions between TFRs on the one hand and Free Relatives (FRs) with a comparable internal configurational structure on the other.

(ii) To provide for a number of representative sub-kinds of TFRs a compositional semantics substantially more detailed and precise than has previously been offered (in particular, in Grosu 2003, section 6).

(iii) To carry out a comprehensive comparison of two views of the configurational structure of TFRs, by examining the extent to which each of them can deal with the syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic properties of TFRs.

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Notes

  1. Šimik (2010) attempts to relate the definiteness of FRs to their obligatory finiteness, but his proposal also rests on a stipulation, and moreover seems to make the incorrect prediction that all finite property-denoting CPs exhibit maximality effects.

  2. I do not think that this enrichment needs to be explicitly added to formal semantic representations, but I have no special objection to doing so. In what follows, I will omit the enrichment.

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Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to three anonymous reviewers and to Henriette de Swart, the handling editor of NLLT, whose penetrating and thought-provoking queries and suggestions on two successive rounds of refereeing helped make this a much better paper than it would have been otherwise. I am also most grateful to Fred Landman, with whom I had a number of intensive discussions prior to the writing of the first version of this paper, and whose ideas contributed significantly to shaping the content and form of the proposals in it, as well as to Nirit Kadmon and Roni Katzir, for useful advice concerning the material in Sect. 5.3. I am also very grateful to Susan Rothstein, Josef Bayer, Lucien Kupfermann and Guglielmo Cinque for checking and/or constructing the English, German, French and Italian data in this paper respectively. Finally, I wish to thank the audiences at the Specificity conference held in Bucharest, Romania, in 2013, the Olinco conference held in Olomouc, the Czech Republic, in 2014, the Linguistics Beyond and Within conference held in Lublin, Poland, in 2014, and the workshop jointly organized by the Wolfgang-Goethe University and the Tel Aviv University, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2014, for helpful comments.

None of these persons is in any way responsible for the use I have made of their ideas, and all remaining faults are exclusively my own.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Webb Building 407, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel

    Alex Grosu

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Grosu, A. The semantics, syntax, and morphology of Transparent Free Relatives revisited; a comparison of two approaches. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 1245–1280 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9333-0

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