GENIUS: G énéricité Séminaire - Marcelo Ferreira 11 février et 16 février

[fabio del prete]

Chers 
collègues,

dans le cadre du séminaire de l'ANR "GENIUS: Genericity: 
Interpretation and Uses", nous avons le plaisir de vous convier àux deux 
prochaines conférences de:
Marcelo Ferreira (Universidade de São Paulo, 
Departamento de Lingüística). Les resumés des deux conférences suivent 
ci-dessous. 
 
Première conférence: 
"Habituals and Plural Events"

jeudi **11 février** à 11h00
à l'ENS
29 rue d'Ulm
Pavillon 
Jardin
Salle de réunions - RdC
 
Deuxième conférence: 
"The Morpho-Semantics of Number in Brazilian Portuguese Bare 
Singulars"
mardi **16 février** à 11h00
à l'ENS
24 rue 
d'Ulm
Salle L 367 ( T4/5 ) (département de physique, troisième étage)
 

 
******Resumé première conférénce: "Habituals and Plural 
Events"

In this talk, I explore the idea that the logical representation 
of certain
habitual sentences involve quantification/reference to plural 
events (see
Kratzer 2004). It has two parts:

In the fist part, I 
contrast the semantics and pragmatics of habitual sentences
with and without 
adverbs of quantification, as exemplified in (1):

(1) a. When Mary visits 
John, he always/usually cries.
b. When Mary visits John, he cries.

I 
claim that whereas a quantificational analysis is adequate for the ones 
with
Q-adverbs, with the adverbs being the counterpart of `every', `most' and 
so on,
the ones without them (which I call `Bare Habituals') should be 
analyzed as
involving plural definite descriptions of events.

In the 
second part, I discuss continuous and habitual readings of 
imperfective
sentences such as those in (2):

(2) a. Mary is dying her 
hair (right now).
b. Mary dyes her hair.

I argue that continuous and 
habitual readings share the same temporal and the
same modal ingredients. I 
assume the presence of an existential/indefinite
event determiner in 
both sentences and argue that the only difference between
the logical 
representations of (2a) and (2b) is the number (singular/plural)
of the event 
variables being quantified over. Continuous readings involve
quantification 
over singular events, whereas habitual readings involve
quantification over 
plural events. I also claim that cross-linguistic variation
within the domain 
of imperfectivity reduces to selectional number requirements
of an event 
determiner.
http://lumiere.ens.fr/~amari/genius/Seminar.htm


*****Resumé deuxième conférence: "The 
Morpho-Semantics of Number in Brazilian Portuguese Bare Singulars"

In 
this talk, I provide evidence against the idea that 
bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are morphologically
singular but semantically number neuter. I argue instead that they
are sometimes specified for number (singular) and sometimes
under-specified and that this has semantic consequences. I develop
an account according to which whether or not a bare noun can enter
a syntactic derivation under-specified for number depends on the
functional heads to which it is syntactically related. The
conclusion is that, as far as number is concerned,
morpho-syntactic specification should NOT be kept apart from
semantic interpretation.
http://lumiere.ens.fr/~amari/genius/Seminar.htm

Bien 
cordialement,

Fabio Del Prete, pour les membres du groupe 
"Généricité"
 		 	   		  
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