Defniteness effect in HPSG

[Raúl Aranovich]

I would appreciate any references to work done in HPSG or related
formalisms on the Definiteness Effect. This may include constraints on the
definiteness restriction in English existential sentences, the
interpretation and distribution of bare nouns, genericity, and the lexical
representation of Individual-Level predicates (verbs/adjectives). If I get
a sufficient number of references, I will post them to the list.

The problem I am trying to work out pertains to the distribution of bare
nouns in Romance. For a long time it has been debated whether postverbal
bare noun subjects (PBNS) in Romance were allowed only with unaccusatives.
This turns out not to be the right generalization. The facts seem to point
out to a 'semantic' constraint instead: I-level predicates do not allow
PBNSs. Longobardi (LI: 2000) has an analysis in an Antisymmetry framework,
where he uses Diesing's Mapping Hypothesis. My criticism of Longobardi's
analysis is too involved to mention it here, but I am looking for
alternatives to the now widespread use of the Heim/Diesing framework to
deal with indefinites. Comments on these ideas will be appreciated!


                 |-------------------------------------|
                 |           Raul Aranovich            |
                 |      Department of linguistics      |
                 |    Univesity of California Davis    |
                 |         One Shields Avenue          |
                 |        Davis, CA 95616, USA         |
                 |                                     |
                 |           (530) 752-9933            |
                 |      <raranovich at ucdavis.edu>       |
                 |-------------------------------------|