Friday, October 30: Emily Hanink and Julian Grove

Please join us this Friday as Emily Hanink and Julian Grove from the Linguistics Department present work on the German syntax-semantics interface. Please note that this will be our first meeting at our new default time of 10:30 a.m.

Title: Restrictive relatives, “same,” and the semantics of the German definite article

Date and time: Friday, October 30, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)

Abstract:

German definite articles are able to contract with prepositions under certain conditions. Schwarz (2009) argues that this contraction is blocked when a noun phrase is discourse anaphoric, otherwise it freely applies. In the current paper, we present a construction that counter-exemplifies this generalization: Restrictive relative clauses require the use of the non-contracted (strong) article form, despite their apparent lack of anaphoricity; both the determiner associated with the head noun and the relative pronoun (which is, in most cases, syncretic with the definite article) surface with the strong form. To account for this puzzle, we provide a uniform analysis of discourse anaphoric and relative clause uses that requires interpreting indices as features that may occupy their own projections in DP structure. In our analysis, the distinction between the strong and weak form is structural; the strong form contains an additional projection, which we call ‘idxP’, which hosts an index feature that may act either as a bindee, in the discourse anaphoric and relative-clause internal position, or as a binder, in the relative-clause external position. By building assignment functions into the semantic model (Sternefeld 1998, 2001; Kobele 2006, 2010; Kennedy 2014), we show that idxcan compositionally bind elements within its scope. We therefore unite anaphoric and relative clause uses by showing that both require the same additional structure, which is absent in the contracted (weak form), for binding purposes. We support this structure with morphological evidence for the presence of idx, which we argue can be realized overtly by the modifier same. An additional benefit of this proposal is that a single, Strawsonian denotation is preserved for all definite article uses, which is not possible in Schwarz’s system.