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DP Structure and Flexible Semantics

Yoad Winter

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Abstract

Two general paradigms have influenced the study of nominals since the middle eighties. According to the syntactic DP hypothesis of Abney (1987), the syntactic unit that had formerly been known as noun phrase should in fact be analyzed as a phrase headed by a determiner, hence the label DP. Figure 1 gives a simple version of the DP hypothesis, without deciding here about the category of the specifier. DP SPEC D' D NP Figure 1: The DP hypothesis Quite independently of this syntactic development, Partee (1987) proposed a type shifting paradigm for the semantic analysis of nominals (now called DPs). In Partee's proposal DPs are ambiguous between a referential reading of type e, a predicative reading of type he; ti and a quantificational reading of type hhe; ti; ti. DP meanings can flexibly

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Two general paradigms have influenced the study of nominals since the middle eighties. According to the syntactic DP hypothesis of Abney (1987), the syntactic unit that had formerly been known as noun phrase should in fact be analyzed as a phrase headed by a determiner, hence the label DP. Figure 1 gives a simple version of the DP hypothesis, without deciding here about the category of the specifier. DP SPEC D' D NP Figure 1: The DP hypothesis Quite independently of this syntactic development, Partee (1987) proposed a type shifting paradigm for the semantic analysis of nominals (now called DPs). In Partee's proposal DPs are ambiguous between a referential reading of type e, a predicative reading of type he; ti and a quantificational reading of type hhe; ti; ti. DP meanings can flexibly

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Two general paradigms have influenced the study of nominals since the middle eighties. According to the syntactic DP hypothesis of Abney (1987), the syntactic unit that had formerly been known as noun phrase should in fact be analyzed as a phrase headed by a determiner, hence the label DP. Figure 1 gives a simple version of the DP hypothesis, without deciding here about the category of the specifier. DP SPEC D' D NP Figure 1: The DP hypothesis Quite independently of this syntactic development, Partee (1987) proposed a type shifting paradigm for the semantic analysis of nominals (now called DPs). In Partee's proposal DPs are ambiguous between a referential reading of type e, a predicative reading of type he; ti and a quantificational reading of type hhe; ti; ti. DP meanings can flexibly

Key concepts: Specifier, Determiner phrase, Noun phrase, Linguistics, Phrase, Determiner, Semantics (computer science), Simple (philosophy)

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