The Layered DP: Form and meaning of French indefinites(124 Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)

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.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Chapter 1. Introduction; 3. Chapter 2. un-NPs 'a-NPs'; 4. Chapter 3. Du/des-NPs; 5. Chapter 4. Bare Nouns; 6. Chapter 5. Conclusion; 7. Bibliography; 8. Index

Review :
This extremely well written monograph studies the correlation between the diverse interpretations of indefinite noun phrases and their syntactic structure or form. Ihsane argues, quite convincingly in my view, that distinct semantic interpretations are structurally dependent one on the other and that this dependency can be expressed in terms of syntactic domination. The proposed structures provide a neat solution to various problems relating to scope dependency. In this book, Tabea Ihsane focuses on the occurrence and distribution of French nominal phrases of the type un-NP ('a-NP') and du/des-NP ('of the-NP'). Crucially, the analyses tables on the observation that these DPs have three different readings. This leads to the core innovative proposal, which is that each interpretation of an indefinite corresponds to a distinct syntactic structure, which transparently encodes the relevant semantic properties and scope of the DP. Tabea Ihsane's research emerges from the recent trend of increasing concern about the relation between interpretation and structure. The author adopts the hypothesis that interpretive properties, which can be read off visible scope effects, are due to the internal structure of the DP. This leads to a radical theoretic orientation, which advocates a strict association of semantic micro-properties and syntactic structure. In this sense, this study is definitely interface-oriented, and will be of great interest both to researchers working on the syntax of French and to linguists engaged in work on the micro-mechanisms of the syntax-semantics interface. Ihsane applies the cartographic approach to the syntactic representation of semantic features and argues for a complex structure of what is usually considered quite mininal (such as the article un). The result may be controversial but is certainly of interest.