Quantificational Topics - Ebert, Cornelia

. .

Résumé :
Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour. The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems. The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

Sommaire:
Introduction.- Information Structure.-Truth-Conditional Effects of Information Structure.-Topical Quantifiers.- Topicality and Exceptional Wide Scope.- An Outline of the Proposal.- The Structure of This Book.- Topicality.- Defining Topicality.- Aboutness.- Familiarity.- Topics as Entities.- Indefinite Topics.- Reinhart (1981).- Topic Tests and Topical Quantifiers.- Simple Tests.- Syntactic Marking.- Intonational Marking.- Morphological Marking.- A Discourse Configurational Language: Hungarian.- Alleged Topic Tests.- Conclusion.- Genuine and Apparent Scope Readings.- Specificity.- Ioup (1977).- Hintikka (1986).- Enc? (1991).- Consequences.- Wide Scope.- Apparent Wide Scope .- Apparent vs. Genuine Wide Scope.- Functional readings.- Data.- Natural Functions.- Properties of Natural Functions.- Apparent vs. Genuine Narrow Scope.- Conclusion.- ExceptionalWide Scope.- Scope Islands.- The Class of Wide Scope Quantifiers.- Genuine vs. Apparent Exceptional Wide Scope.- Approaches Relying on Speaker's Reference.- Fodor and Sag (1982).- Other Approaches.- Problems.- Approaches Relying on Domain Restriction.- Schwarzschild (2002).- Other Approaches.- Problems.- Presuppositional Approaches.- Yeom (1998).- Cresti (1995).- Other Approaches.- Problems.- Choice Function Approaches.- Reinhart (1997); Winter (1997).- Kratzer (1998).- Problems.- Consequences.- Approaches Relying on Wide Extraction.- Discussion.- Conclusion.- Semantic Effects of Topicality.- Types of Aboutness Topics.- Intonation.- 5.3 Topicality Induces Wide.- Genuine Wide Scope vs. Apparent Wide Scope.- Apparent Non-Wide Scope Interpretations of Direct Aboutness Topics.- Does a Strong Interpretation Imply Topicality?.- Approaches Relating Exceptional Wide Scope to Topicality.- Conclusion.- Exceptional Wide Scope as a Topic Phenomenon.- Deriving the Classification.- Technical Preliminaries.- Quantifier Semantics.- Structured Meanings.- Components of the Theory.- Creating a Topic Discourse Referent.- The TopicCondition.- Quantifier Classification.- Topic Assert.- Deriving Wide Scope via Topicality.- Intermediate Scope Readings.- Data.- Analysis.- Problems.- Functional Topics.- The Interpretation of Functional DPs.- Topic Interpretation and the Topic Condition with Functional DPs.- Conclusion.- Conclusion.- A Technicalities and Experiments.- Generalized Quantifiers.- Monotonicity.- Witness Sets.- Lexical Quantifier Semantics.- Pilot Studies.- The Accent Pattern of Wide Scope Indefinites.- Wide Scope vs. 'Anti-Distributivity'.- Subject index.