Interpretación genérica de sintagmas nominales con núcleo elíptico
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Universidad Complutense de Madrid
info
ISSN: 1893-3211
Year of publication: 2018
Issue Title: Monographic topic: the syntax and semantics of determiners and quantifiers in Spanish
Volume: 7
Issue: 2
Pages: 135-160
Type: Article
More publications in: Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics
Abstract
In this paper we study noun phrases containingan empty nounwhich has a generic human meaning. The noun phrase doesn’t have an antecedentfrom which the noun can recover its features deictically or anaphorically. This is why it has been suggestedthat in these cases we are dealing with a pronoun, instead of a determiner. We have argued that there is also an empty nounin these cases, even if the empty category doesn’t seem to be subject to the semantic conditions that empty categories usually obey, in the sense that it is not D-linked. We have showed,firstly, that the empty category has the feature [+human], secondly,that it is legitimated only in generic sentences and finally, that it recovers its features through a last resort mechanism, which allows the empty category to take this humanmeaning when there is no other way available to recover its features from the context.