17 found
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  1.  81
    Restrictive if/when clauses.Donka F. Farkas & Yoko Sugioka - 1983 - Linguistics and Philosophy 6 (2):225 - 258.
  2. Varieties of Indefinites.Donka F. Farkas - 2002 - SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) 12:59-83.
    Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have received in the literature, characterizing what is common to all of them and what is specific to each is still an elusive task. This paper investigates the first three determiners in this list, (...)
     
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  3.  53
    Assessing alternatives: the case of the presumptive future in Italian.Michela Ippolito & Donka F. Farkas - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (4):943-984.
    In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study (...)
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  4. The Semantics of Incorporation.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    The aim of this series is to make exploratory work that employs new linguistic data, extending the scope or domain of current theoretical proposals, available to a wide audience. These monographs will provide an insightful generalization..
     
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  5. How indefinites choose their scope.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (1):1-55.
    The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide (...)
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  6.  18
    Evaluation indices and scope.Donka F. Farkas - 1997 - In Anna Szabolcsi (ed.), Ways of Scope Taking. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 183--215.
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  7. Dependent Indefinites.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    The paper rst lays out a non-congurational approach to scope ambiguities in which scope dependencies are treated as dependencies between evaluation indices of variables. The notions of dependent and domain variables are dened naturally in this framework. These concepts are then used to account for the distribution and interpretation of determiner reduplication in Hungarian, a phenomenon that has not received much attention so far.1 1. Introduction This paper contributes to the study of the semantics of indenites in natural language by (...)
     
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  8. Extreme Non−Specificity in Romanian.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    In the extensive literature on the semantics of noun phrases, the most commonly encountered paramters of classification concern the semantic type of their denotation, the distinction between familiarity and novelty, meant primarily to differentiate definites from indefinites, the strong/weak distinction, or that between quantificational and non−quantificational noun phrases, as well as, most recently, that between choice−functional and non−choice−functional DPs (Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999).
     
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  9. Specicity and Scope.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    1 The notion of specicity has played a signicant role in linguistic theory both in the elds of semantics and, increasingly, in work on syntax/semantics interface., Abbott, Kripke, Fodor and Sag, Higginbotham and Enc among many others; see also Pesetsky, Szabolcsi and Zwarts, Diesing, Dobrovie- Sorin, E. Kiss, Mahajan, and Chung for work where specicity is discussed in connection with syntactic matters.) Specicity is interesting for the student of semantics because it is crucially relevant to establishing varieties of reference. For (...)
     
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  10.  95
    On obligatory control.Donka F. Farkas - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (1):27 - 58.
  11. Say reports, assertion events and meaning dimensions.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - manuscript
    In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to (...)
     
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  12. The grammar of polarity particles in Romanian.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    The immediate aim of this paper is to account for the use and interpretation of polarity particles in general, and of the Romanian polarity particles da/nu/ba in particular. We exemplify the uses of da and nu in (1) and (3) respectively.
     
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  13. Scope and the grammar of choice.Donka F. Farkas & Adrian Brasoveanu - unknown
    and Data The essence of scope in natural language semantics can be characterized as follows: an expression e1 takes scope over an expression e2 iff the interpretation of the former affects the interpretation of the latter. Consider, for example, the sentence in (1) below, which is typical of the cases discussed in this paper in that it involves an indefinite and a universal (or, more generally, a non-existential) quantifier. (1) Everyx student in my class read ay paper about scope. How (...)
     
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  14. Exceptional wide scope as anaphora to quantificational dependencies.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - manuscript
    The paper proposes a novel account to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, e.g. the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote before World War II. We propose that ES readings are available when the sentence is interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse. For example, the two every quantifiers and the indefinite elaborate on the sets of (...)
     
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  15. Polarity particles in hungarian.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    This paper proposes an account of the distribution and role of a set of particles in Hungarian dubbed `polarity particles', which include igen `yes', nem `no', and de `but'. These particles occur at the leftmost edge of a class of assertions uttered as reactions to an immediately preceding assertion or polar question. It is argued that they express two sets of features typical of the class of reactive assertions they occur in, one set encoding the polarity of the asserted sentence, (...)
     
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  16. To appear in a Festschrift for Larry Horn edited by Gregory Ward and Betty Birner.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    This paper explores the determiner corner of the ‘any’ land in Romanian, taking Lee and Horn 1994 and Horn 2000a as tour guides. The immediate interest of the task lies in the fact that the work done in English by the over-employed determiner any is carried out in Romanian by a host of more specialized (and, one fears, lower paid) morphemes, which I review in the rest of this section. My aim is to introduce the details of the Romanian facts (...)
     
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  17. Ucsc.Donka F. Farkas - unknown
    The notion of specificity in linguistics is notoriously non-specific. We consider here various distinctions within the realm of noun phrase semantics that are relevant to specificity. The common thread uniting these distinctions is the notion of variation in value assignments for the variable introduced by the noun phrase. The distinctions concern the nature of the variation involved. The first part of the paper (Section 2) is devoted to the definite/indefinite divide and proposes a dynamic parameter of 'determinacy of reference' which (...)
     
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