Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, LisbonEdited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 83–102
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 83–102
Why are distributive readings dispreferred?
The paper reports the results of four experiments that were meant to investigate the availability of distributive readings in three types of French sentences, which involved singular indefinite DPs in the object position but differed with respect to the syntax of the subject DP (def-plDP, groupDP,
most of
DP). Our results show a clear contrast between def-plDP and groupDP vs.
most of
DP: the collective reading is preferred with the former, and the distributive reading is preferred with the latter. We will propose complexity-based explanations, which attribute dispreferred readings to an increase in processing load.
References (22)
Baayen, R.H. 2011. "Analyzing Linguistic Data: A practical introduction to statistics". R package version 1.4. [URL].
Beck, Sigrid. 2001. “Reciprocals and Definites”. Natural Language Semantics 9: 69–138. 
Bott, Oliver and Janina Radó. 2009. “How to provide exactly one interpretation for every sentence, or what eye movements reveal about quantifier scope”. In The fruits of empirical linguistics, vol. 1: Process, ed. by S. Featherston and S. Winkler, 25–46. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.
Brooks, Patricia J. and Martin D.S Braine. 1996. “What do children know about the universal quantifiers all and each?” Cognition 60 (3): 235–268.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 2014. "Collective quantification and the homogeneity constraint". In Proceedings of SALT 24, 453–472.
. 2015. "Two Types of Most". In Proceedings of SALT 25, 394–412.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen and Ion Giurgea. 2015. “Weak Reference and Property Denotation. Two Types of Pseudo-incorporated Bare Nominals”. Syntax and Semantics 40 (
The Syntax and Semantics of Pseudo-Incorporation
), ed. by Olga Borik et Berit Gehrke), 88–125.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen, Tonia Bleam and M. Teresa Espinal. 2006. “Bare nouns, number and types of incorporation”. In Non-definiteness and plurality, ed. by Svetlana Vogeleer and Liliane Tasmowski, 51–79. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van Der Does, Jaap. 1993. “Sums and quantifiers”. Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (5): 509–550.
Dotlačil, Jakub. 2010. Anaphora and distributivity. A study of same, different, reciprocals and others. PhD diss. Utrecht University.
. 2015.”Why is distributivity so hard? New evidence from distributive markers and licensors in Czech”. To appear in Proceedings of
FDSL
10.5, [URL]
Espinal, M. Teresa and Louise McNally. 2011. “Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan”. Journal of Linguistics 47: 87–128.
Frazier, Lyn, Patch, Jeremy M. and Rayner, Keith. 1999. “Taking on semantic commitments, II: colllective versus distributive readings”, Cognition 70(2): 87–104.
De la Fuente, Israel and Barbara Hemforth. 2013. “Effects of Clefting and Left-Dislocation on Subject and Object Pronoun Resolution in Spanish.” In Proceedings of the 16th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. by Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro, Gillian Lord, Ana de Prada Pérez, and Jessi Elana Aaron, 27–45. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Higginbotham, Jim. 1994. “Mass and count quantifiers”. Language and Philosophy 17 (5): 447–480.
Landman, Fred. 2000. Events and plurality: the Jerusalem lectures. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Link, Godehard. 1983. “The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: a lattice-theoretical approach”. In Meaning, use and interpretation of language, ed. by Rainer Bauerle, Christoph Schwarze, and Arnim von Stechow, 302–323. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lønning, Jan Tore. 1987. “Mass terms and quantification”. Linguistics and Philosophy 10 (1):1–52.
Magri, Georgi. 2012. “Collective nouns without groups”. In
IATL 27: Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics
, 183–202.
Pagliarini, Elena, Gaetano Fiorin and Jakub Dotlačil. 2012. “The acquisition of distributivity in pluralities”. In
Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development
, ed. by A.K. Biller and E.Y. Chung and A.E. Kimball, 387–399. Cascadilla Press.
Sharvy, Richard. 1980. “A more general theory of definite descriptions.” Philosophical Review 89 (4):607–624.
Sternefeld, Wolfgang. 1998. “Reciprocity and Cumulative Predication.” Natural Language Semantics 6 (3): 303–337.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Corr, Alice
2022. Numeral Reduplication and Clausal Syntax: Grammaticalized Distributivity in Medieval Iberia. Probus 34:2 ► pp. 317 ff. 
Konrad, Ingrid, Massimo Burattin, Carlo Cecchetto, Francesca Foppolo, Adrian Staub & Caterina Donati
2021. Avoiding Gaps in Romance: Evidence from Italian and French for a Structural Parsing Principle. Syntax 24:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Arsenijević, Boban, Jana Willer‐Gold, Nadira Aljović, Nermina Čordalija, Marijana Kresić Vukosav, Nedžad Leko, Frane Malenica, Franc Lanko Marušič, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Milićević, Petra Mišmaš, Ivana Mitić, Anita Peti‐Stantić, Branimir Stanković, Jelena Tušek & Andrew Nevins
2020. Elided Clausal Conjunction Is Not the Only Source of Closest‐Conjunct Agreement: A Picture‐Matching Study. Syntax 23:1 ► pp. 78 ff.
Pozniak, Céline, Barbara Hemforth, Yair Haendler, Andrea Santi & Nino Grillo
2019. Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses. Journal of Memory and Language 107 ► pp. 128 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.