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| Organizers | Workshop schedule | Invited Guests | Student Contributions | Brochure (PDF-File) |

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Organizers :

Prof. Dr. Manuel Leonetti – University of Alcalá
Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger – University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr. Georg Kaiser – University of Konstanz

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Workshop schedule:

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Invited Guests:

On some indefinite determiners of French

Ileana Comorovski
(Université Nancy 2)
Ileana.Comorovski@univ-nancy2.fr

The talk will present a French indefinite determiner from each of the two traditional classes of indefinites: indefinite articles and cardinal determiners. The article quelque will be analyzed in its combination with a singular count noun (e.g. quelque question). It will be shown that in such DPs quelque can have two interpretations, one being that of a free choice indefinite (Corblin (2003)) and the other one being that of a possibility operator. We will next trace the history of the lexical item divers from pre-Classical French to contemporary French; the purpose of this inquiry into the diachrony of divers is to show how divers has come to function as a cardinal determiner when occurring in prenominal position (diverses questions) and as an adjective when occurring postnominally (des questions très diverses).

Singular determiners in Italian

Roberto Zamparelli
(Università di Bergamo)
roberto@unibg.it

In this talk I will give an overview of the behaviour of various Italian singular determiners:

qualche N (singular "some")
qualcuno (someone)
qualcosa (something)

nessun N ("no")
nessuno (no-one)

ogni N ("every")
ognuno ("every-one")

niente (singular "no")
qualsiasi (free_choice "any")

These determiners have various peculiarities. The "-uno" form refers to humans, and agrees in gender. All the other forms have no agreement, tolerate N-conjunctions ("qualche adulto e bambino" `some adult and child', 2 people) and cannot be predicative (with interesting exceptions). In addition "Niente" is negative but with a definite meaning, while "qualsiasi" can appear under an indefinite article ("un qualsiasi N" `an any N'). I will relate these semantic properties to the structural position these elements occupy, and discuss some implications for the syntax/semantics interface.

Determination and Typology:
Why Er verwendet Butter, und nicht Öl and Usa burro, e non Olio, but not *Il utilise beurre, et non pas huile?

Elisabeth Stark
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Elisabeth.Stark@romanistik.uni-muenchen.de

The aim of the talk will be to find an adquate (and typologically convincing) explanation for the distribution and functional load of 'non-determination’ in Italian. Compared to French, one of its ‘sister languages’ in Romance, Italian admits more readily non-determined noun phrases in argument position – but still much less than e.g. German. Two proposals of classification and explanation for these facts (Schroten 1991 and Chierchia 1998) will be discussed and criticized in a Romance perspective, before an alternative explanation will be given, which considers Romance indefinite determiner systems as a supplmentation and/or complementation of the original Latin classification system via a considerably complex noun morphology.

• Chierchia, Gennaro (1998): „Reference to Kinds across Languages“, in: Natural Language Semantics 6-4, 339-405.
• Lehmann, Christian (1991): „The Latin Nominal Group in a Typological Perspective“, in: Robert Coleman (ed.): New Studies in Latin Linguistics. Selected Papers from the 4th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Cambridge, April 1987, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 203-232.
• Schroten, Jan (2001): „L’absence de déterminant en espagnol“, in: Georges Kleiber / Brenda Laca / Liliane Tasmowski (eds.): Typologie des groupes nominaux, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 189-203.
  

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Student Contributions:

Definiteness and Genericity in French and Turkish. A contrastive study

Dilek Donat

Possessive Noun Phrases in English

Nicole Falkenhayner

The Romanian Article

Maria Sabina Franz

The theory of the Romance adjective position

Nathalie Fritz

The Romanian Particle „pe“

Cristina Ghodsi Khameneh

Genericity - Generic readings: kind vs. characteristic readings

Mirjam Huss

The development of articles in the Germanic languages

Uta Jansen

The development of articles and clitics in Romance languages

Nikola Kohl

Cardinaletti, „On the Deficient / Strong Opposition in Posessive Systems”

Chryssoula Stefanou

On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars

Magdalena Thomas

Noun Incorporation in Hungarian

Tobias Weber

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