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Description:
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This book examines argumental un-NPs and du/des-NPs in
French: nominals with the indefinite article and with the so-called
'partitive article' respectively. The main aim is to account for the
different interpretations of these indefinites and to determine how
interpretation and structure are related. This study thus concerns the
syntax-semantics interface, with an emphasis on the composition of the left
periphery and the inflectional domain of the indefinites mentioned. It is
realized in the framework of generative grammar and in a cartographic
approach. A crucial proposal put forward in this book is that indefinites
of different semantic types are associated with different left peripheries.
The analysis further suggests that the inflectional domain of these
indefinites may comprise three discrete functional projections encoding the
features [count], [quantity] and [number]. Interestingly, these results
seem to extend to a selection of bare nouns in Romance and Germanic languages.
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