Weak referentiality

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology. Content: 1. List of contributors; 2. List of abbreviations; 3. Advances in weak referentiality (by Aguilar-Guevara, Ana); 4. Modal inferences in marked indefinites: the case of German irgend-indefinites (by Aloni, Maria); 5. Epistemic and scopal properties of some indefinites (by Ionin, Tania); 6. Antonymic prepositions and weak referentiality (by Kiss, Tibor); 7. Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals (by Bogatyreva, Lidia); 8. Predicate nominals in Papiamentu: a comparison with Brazilian Portuguese and other languages (by Schmitt, Cristina); 9. Many a plural (by Mathieu, Eric); 10. Telic definites and their prepositions: French and Serbian (by Asic, Tijana); 11. How weak and how definite are Weak Definites? (by Schwarz, Florian); 12. Modified weak definites (by Aguilar-Guevara, Ana); 13. Functional frames in the interpretation of weak nominals (by Zwarts, Joost); 14. Unscrambling the lexical nature of weak definites (by Swart, Peter de); 15. Inalienable possession: the status of the definite article (by Le Bruyn, Bert); 16. Basque nominals: from a system with bare nouns to a system without (by Etxeberria, Urtzi); 17. Referential properties of definites and salience spreading (by Schumacher, Petra B.); 18. Index We provide a survey of different aspects of definiteness by means of comprehension data collected via event-related brain potential recordings. We present a processing account including differences between definites and indefinites, as well as the contribution of lexical feature specifications, uniqueness, degrees of accessibility and enrichment. We then present new data associated with salience spreading from referential expressions to their supersets. Two core mechanisms emerge in all these studies that reflect the computation of accessibility information on the one hand and updating of disc