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Auteur: Agata Maria RENANS

Titre:
Functions of exclusives in Ga


Abstract/Résumé: Exclusives are widely discussed in both semantics and pragmatics. The data from Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo) show that exclusives can have other functions apart from operating on the discourse structure (Beaver and Clark (2008)), viz. in Ga NPs can have both group and sum interpretations (pace Schwarzschild (1991) and confirming Landman (1996)) and the role of the exclusives is to determine the interpretation of the NP. Exclusives in Ga There are (i) basic (kome, too, pE) and (ii) complex exclusives (kome too, kome pE, kome too pE) in Ga. The meanings of the complex exclusives is derived compositionally from the meanings of the basic exclusives. Data Sentence (1) with both, too and pE obtains a collective reading interpretation of the object denotation. (1) Lisa ye-O loo too/pE. Lisa eat-HAB fish PART/PART `Lisa eats only fish.' When too and pE are parts of the complex exclusives, the interpretation of (2) varies between a collective reading (with kome too) and a distributive reading (with kome pE): (2) Lisa ye-O loo kome too/kome pE. Lisa eat-HAB fish PART/PART `Lisa eats only fish /only 1 fish.' Analysis Singular NP loo has a mass noun denotation (in the sense of Chierchia (1998)): ∙ loo: {a, b, c, a + b, a + c, b + c, a + b + c} Kome is analysed as a cardinality term (cf. Coppock and Beaver (2012) on unique): ∙ loo kome: {a, b, c} ≈ one fish Both pE and too are exclusives, but too in addition works as a group forming operator '↑', which maps a sum onto an atomic group individual (Landman (1996), Schwarzschild (1991)). Moreover, pE scopes over kome, whereas too is in the scope of kome. Hence, we obtain the following restrictions for the exclusive operator: ∙ loo pE: {a, b, c, a + b, a + c, b + c, a + b + c} ≈ only fish ∙ (loo kome) pE: {a, b, c} ≈ only one fish (pE scopes over kome) ∙ loo too: {↑(a), ↑(b), ↑(c), ↑(a + b), ↑(a + c), ↑(b + c), ↑(a + b + c)} ≈ groups of fish only (too works as `↑') ∙ (loo too) kome: {↑(a), ↑(b), ↑(c), ↑(a+b), ↑(a+c), ↑(b+c), ↑(a+b+c)} ≈ one group of fish only (kome scopes over too) Kome pE and kome too have different restrictions for the exclusive operator and hence they obtain different readings in (2). The same holds for pE and kome pE thus we obtain different readings in (1) and (2). References Beaver, D., Clark, B., (2008), Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Deter- mines Meaning, Oxford. Chierchia, G., (1998), Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of `semantic parameter', in: Rothstein, S. (eds.) Events and Grammar, Dor- drecht. Coppock, E., Beaver, D.,(2012) Exclusivity, Uniqueness, and Definiteness, Msc. Landman, F. (1996), Plurality, in: Lappin, S. (eds.) The Handbook of Contem- porary Semantic Theory, Blackwell, Schwarzschild, R. (1991), On the Meaning of the Definite Plural Noun Phrases, Dissertation. UMass Amherst.