Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2009: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Nice 2009Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Tobias Scheer
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 3] 2011
► pp. 55–70
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.