Friday 8 December, 2000, DIP Colloquium, Veerle van Geenhoven

Friday 8 December, 2000, DIP Colloquium, Veerle van Geenhoven
Speaker: Veerle van Geenhoven, Max Planck Instituut Nijmegen, Psycholinguistiek
Title: On the interaction of pluractionality, properties, and for-adverbials
Place: MFR, Philosophy department, ground flour
Date and Time: Friday December 8th 2000, 15.00-17.00

Abstract:
In the literature, we basically find two accounts of the contrast illustrated in (1) and (2), namely, Dowty's (1979) quantificational account and Krifka's (1989) account in terms of quantization.

1. ? Bill discovered a flea on his dog for an hour.
2. Bill discovered fleas on his dog for an hour.

This paper starts out with an overview of some shortcomings in these two accounts. Alternatively, I argue that the interaction of for-adverbials with indefinite and bare plural complements is guided by a silent pluractional operator that applies to the verb. Linguistic support for the existence of such an operator is drawn from the presence of overt pluractional markers on West Greenlandic verbs. I show that if a pluractional operator applies to a semantically incorporating verb the resulting verb can absorb only those nominals which denote properties that hold of singularities and pluralities simultaneously. This provides the basis for a property-based explanation of the contrast between (1) and (2) as well as a novel perspective on so-called aspectual shifts.