On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality

This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French le même (‘the same’)and addresses two main issues: a. the problem of definiteness (le même does not behave the way standard definites do); b. the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that même needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it). I propose that: a. le même is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity; b. le même is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times. This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates même to the notion of pluractionality.

Published online: 30 November 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.3.04cha