TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bowler, Margit
ED  - Grubic, Mira
ED  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - The status of degrees in Warlpiri
JF  - Proceedings of the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2
N2  - Recent work in semantics has shown that languages can vary in whether or not they include degrees (that is, elements of type < d >) in their semantic ontology. Several authors have argued that their languages of study lack degrees, including Bochnak (2013) for Washo (isolate, USA), Pearson (2009) for Fijian (Austronesian, Fiji), and Beck, et al. (2009) for Motu (Austronesian, Papua New Guinea). In this paper, I follow the tests proposed in Beck, et al. (2009) to assess the status of degrees in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).
I use Warlpiri data collected following the Beck, et al. survey to argue that Warlpiri gradable predicates do not combine with a degree argument. (Like many other Australian languages, adjectival concepts like big and small are expressed using nouns in Warlpiri (Dixon 1982, Bittner & Hale 1995, among others). I refer to these lexical items as “gradable predicates” in this paper.) This paper represents a first pass at assessing the status of degrees in an Australian language, which have otherwise been unexamined from the point of view of degree semantics.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-92295
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hsieh, I-Ta Chris
A1  - Shen, Zheng
ED  - Grubic, Mira
ED  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - The ‘Associative Reading’ of DPs and the quantity vs. quality distinction
JF  - Proceedings of the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2
N2  - This paper investigates an unnoticed difference in Mandarin between the Q-adjectives and the gradable adjectives of quality and shows that this observation follows straightforwardly from a theory that differentiates gradable predication of quantity and that of quality (e.g., Rett 2008; Lin 2014; Solt 2015; a.o.).
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-92304
SP  - 18
EP  - 35
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Korat, Omer
ED  - Grubic, Mira
ED  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - Singular quantified terms
JF  - Proceedings of the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2
N2  - In this paper, I discuss the behavior of singular partitives, focusing on Hebrew. I show that group noun-headed singular quantified terms behave essentially different from other singular quantified terms. Specifically, the domain of quantification in the former is a discrete set (the members of the group), while in the latter the domain of quantification is a set of mass entities. I propose a preliminary analysis of singular quantified terms in Hebrew, respecting the properties peculiar to this language as well as the observations about group vs. non-group singular quantified terms. This analysis is based on a novel class of quantifiers I name ’Measure Quantifiers’, which instantiate relations between algebraic sums. Using shifts between algebraic sums, we can represent the different readings of singular and plural individual or group terms.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-92313
SP  - 36
EP  - 51
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Thuan, Tran
ED  - Grubic, Mira
ED  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - Lone contrastive topic constructions
BT  - a puzzle from Vietnamese
JF  - Proceedings of the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2
N2  - It has been long agreed by formal and functional researchers (primarily based on English data) that contrastive topic marking, namely marking a constituent as a contrastive topic via the B-accent/the rising intonation contour) requires the co-occurrence of focus marking via the A-accent/the falling intonation contour (see Sturgeon 2006, and references therein). However, this consensus has recently been disputed by new findings indicating the occurrence of utterances with only B-accent, dubbed as lone contrastive topic (Büring 2003, Constant 2014). In this paper, I argue, based on the data in Vietnamese, that the presence of lone contrastive topic is just apparent, and that the focus that co-occurs with the seemingly lone contrastive topic is a verum focus.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-92323
SP  - 52
EP  - 64
ER  -