Semántica

Autors:

M.Teresa Espinal (Coord.), Josep Macià, Jaume Mateu, Josep Quer

Títol:

Semántica

Editorial: Akal
Data de publicació: 2014
Pàgines: 352
ISBN13: 978-84-460-3943-3

Més informació

La Semántica es el estudio del significado. El libro que aquí presentamos es un manual sobre dicha materia que tiene fundamentalmente dos objetivos: el primero, introducir a los estudiantes en los temas centrales de la teoría del significado (cuestiones que son típicamente lingüísticas; problemas que se han planteado en filosofía del lenguaje y en lógica y que son pertinentes en teoría lingüística, y problemas que tienen un interés en semántica gracias a los avances producidos en áreas afines como la psicología cognitiva); el segundo, iniciarles en el discurso propio de la argumentación lingüística para el planteamiento y resolución de problemas de significado de las lenguas naturales.
El libro está organizado en ocho capítulos. El primero incluye una reflexión sobre las unidades de estudio de la Semántica y la operación básica de composición del significado, al que sigue otro dedicado a las unidades léxicas y al tipo de significado e información que estas pueden codificar. En el tercero se aborda la noción de referencia y otras relacionadas con ella, en las que se fundamenta la Semántica de Condiciones de Verdad. En los capítulos que siguen se estudian con cierto detalle las nociones de predicación, cuantificación, modificación e intensionalidad; en ellos se discuten fundamentalmente datos del español para justificar las hipótesis y los conceptos teóricos que se presentan. En el último, pensado para estudiantes de posgrado, se plantean problemas de interfaz sintaxis-semántica y de interfaz gramática-cognición, cuyo objetivo fundamental es relacionar y reflexionar sobre algunos conceptos y nociones introducidos en los capítulos precedentes.
Todo ello se acompaña de un abundante material complementario en forma de bibliografías, ejercicios y actividades, que hacen del libro una herramienta fundamental para iniciarse y profundizar en una de las áreas básicas para el conocimiento y dominio de la lengua.

Déprez & Espinal (2020). The Oxford Handbook of Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

Autors:

Déprez, V. & M.T. Espinal (eds.)

Títol:

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

Editorial: Oxford University Press
Data de publicació: 25 de març del 2020
Pàgines: 896
ISBN13: 9780198830528

Més informació

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

Tsiakmakis & Espinal (2022). Expletiveness in grammar and beyond

Autors:

Tsiakmakis, E. & M.T. Espinal

Títol:

Expletiveness in grammar and beyond

Editorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 7(1)
Data de publicació: Maig del 2022

Text complet

This paper sets out to find the defining characteristics of so-called expletive categories and the consequences the existence of such categories has for Universal Grammar. Looking into different instantiations of expletive subjects and impersonal pronouns, definite articles, negative markers and plural markers in various natural languages, we reach the following generalizations: (i) expletive categories are deficient functional elements interpreted as introducing an identity function at the level of semantic representation, (ii) they can be divided into syntactic expletives, that occur to satisfy some syntactic relationship with another item in the clause, and semantic expletives, that stand in a semantic dependency with some c-commanding category, and (iii) expletive categories tend to develop additional meaning components that are computed beyond core grammar, at the level where speech act-related information is encoded. Our discussion reveals that all categories that have been traditionally considered as expletive in the linguistic literature are interpretable in grammar or beyond and, thus, do not violate Chomsky’s Full Interpretation Principle. We conclude that there are no expletive elements in natural languages and that expletiveness is not a grammatically relevant concept.

Espinal & Cyrino (2022). A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity

Autors:

M.T. Espinal & Sonia Cyrino

Títol:

A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity

Editorial: Journal of Linguistics 58(3), Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Agost 2022

Més informació

In this paper we present an original approach to analyze the compositionality of indefinite expressions in Romance by investigating the relevance of their syntactic distribution in relation to their meaning. This approach has the advantage of allowing us to explore the question of how syntactic structure can determine the meaning of different forms of indefiniteness. To that end, we postulate a common derivation for bare plurals, bare mass and de phrases, whereby an abstract operator DE is adjoined to definite determiners and shifts entities into property-type expressions. Quantificational specificity is proposed to be derived from a syntactic structure in which weak quantifiers select for indefinite DE-phrases, no matter whether de is overt at Spell-Out or not; these quantifiers turn properties into generalized quantifiers. The anti-specificity meaning of some indefinites is derived by adjoining in the syntactic structure an abstract operator ALG that encodes the speaker’s epistemic state of ignorance to a quantifier encoded for specificity, and it turns a generalized quantifier into a modified generalized quantifier. The paper also brings some general predictions on how indefiniteness is expressed in Romance, as it provides extensive support from five Romance languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish.

Mendia & Espinal (2024). Non-agreeing degree constructions

Autors:

Jon Ander Mendia & Maria Teresa Espinal

Títol:

Non-agreeing degree constructions

Editorial: Journal of Linguistics (Cambridge University Press)
Data de publicació: Online: 4 juny 2024
Pàgines: 36

Text complet

This paper deals with a construction, which we dub Non-Agreeing Degree (NAD) constructions, with the distinguishing property that the agreement pattern between subjects and degree predicates is optionally disrupted, even in languages (like Spanish) where verbs commonly agree with their subjects. We show that the agreeing versus non-agreeing alternation comes with important semantic differences for the interpretation of the degree construction. We provide a first systematic description of this type of constructions and postulate a formal syntactic and semantic analysis. We argue that NAD constructions are characterized by degree predicates that introduce a non-conventional nominal scale and by subjects that are interpreted as equally non-conventional units of measurement. We postulate an intensionalization process on the subject of NAD constructions, which we capture via a general nominalization function that allows a default as well as an ordinary agreement pattern between subject and copula.