Abstract
A key function of natural language is to exchange information about the world. We use nominal elements (a student, the teacher,&) to refer to the individuals and objects we talk about. Many languages (including Dutch, English, Spanish, etc.) use articles like a and the to indicate the referential status of entities in the discourse (old/new, unique/one among many). Sometimes, a nominal occurs ?bare?, i.e. without an article, as in read books, drink milk, but in the languages under consideration, that is usually not allowed with count singular nouns: read a book/*read book, except in special constructions (in jail, mother and child, day after day). There is an extensive literature on articles and bare plurals, but the focus is on the standard referential function of nominals, and existing analyses do not cover the less referential uses that we find in be a lawyer, take the bus, in jail. Such nominals do not set up individual discourse referents in conversational space (cf. John is in jail. #It is a big building), but they have a more abstract semantic value (properties, types, means, activities, etc.) We therefore call these nominals weakly referential. We find variation in the presence/absence of an article (watch television versus listen to the radio), also across languages (be a lawyer versus French être avocat, English in jail, and French en prison versus Dutch in de gevangenis, and op kantoor versus at the office, au bureau). The main aim of this project is to provide an account of the distribution and meaning of weakly referential nominals in languages that use definite and indefinite articles for purposes of reference. We take data from Germanic and Romance languages, because they exemplify the relevant distributional patterns. The central questions to be addressed are: (i) How can we determine the range of nouns, and the range of constructions in which weak referential readings arise in Germanic/Romance in a systematic theory of the lexicon-syntax interface? (ii) Can we provide a semantics of weakly referential nominals in accordance with the way human beings understand them? (iii) Can we support natural language processing and lexicographical applications by building linguistic resources of weakly referential expressions in a cross-linguistic perspective? The three subprojects work out answers to these three questions by using innovative methods such as parallel/comparative corpus research and eye tracking experiments. The central claims are embedded in the recently developed framework of bidirectional optimality theory (cf. Hendriks et al. 2007, de Swart and Zwarts 2007). The results will enhance our understanding of the cognitive organization of referentiality as expresssed in natural language, and support potential applications in lexicography and automatic/computer-assisted translation.