This book examines the semantics and pragmatics of determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as Spanish algun. It offers novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals.

This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algún: the sentence María se casó con algún medico ('Maria married some doctor or other') both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker's inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question. Although epistemic indefinites have featured in recent semantic literature, a full understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking: there is currently no agreement on the source of their epistemic component; there is insufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items; and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, a team of experts in the field offer novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals. They provide a coherent overview of the issues that shape the subject as well as placing them in the context of current semantic research, moving towards the development of a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.

This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis 'some', nullus 'no', and nemo 'no one') between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change.

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.

This volume explores the interface between morphosyntax and semantics-pragmatics in the domain of referential and quantificational nominal expressions, by means of synchronic and diachronic case studies from Romance and Germanic languages.

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology.

In recent years, the study of formal semantics and formal pragmatics has grown tremendously, showing that core aspects of language meaning can be explained by a few principles. These principles are grounded in the logic that is behind - and tightly intertwined with - the grammar of human language. In this book, some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara H. Partee, offer new insights into the nature of linguistic meaning and pave the way for the further development of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Each chapter investigates various dimensions in which the logical nature of human language manifests itself within a language and/or across languages. Phenomena like bare plurals, free choice items, scalar implicatures, intervention effects, and logical operators are investigated in depth and at times cross-linguistically and/or experimentally. This volume will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.