Meaning of words, meaning of sentences. Building the meaning of n-words

This article addresses the general question of what the meaning of words, namely nwords, is and how this meaning may contribute to the meaning of sentences. We hypothesize that this contribution is not conceptual, but it is fundamentally underspecified. An underspecified value can be attributed both...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Espinal, M. Teresa|||0000-0002-8079-7253, Tubau, Susagna|||0000-0002-3677-6607
Tipo de recurso: capítulo de libro
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:uabarcelona_::363886fab7b45b786e904ab6f8480262
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/327756
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Underspecified meaning
Compositionality
N-words
Romance languages
Descripción
Sumario:This article addresses the general question of what the meaning of words, namely nwords, is and how this meaning may contribute to the meaning of sentences. We hypothesize that this contribution is not conceptual, but it is fundamentally underspecified. An underspecified value can be attributed both to an inherent semantic feature and to a syntactic feature with which a lexical root merges during the derivation. In the specific case of n-words, we postulate a semantic feature that guarantees their behavior as polarity items, and a syntactic feature that guarantees their occurrence in Negative Concord structures. The Principle of Compositionality is guaranteed by checking both semantic features and syntactically uninterpretable ones.