Speaker: Giuseppe Varaschin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Title: From descriptions to epithets: A structurally uniform account of definites
Time: Wednesday, October 22nd, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Slurs are nominal expressions that contribute meaning on both the truth-conditional (TC) and use-conditional (UC) dimensions, functioning as constraints on utterance contexts (Kaplan 1999; McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2015, i.a.). When such expressions appear as complements of definite determiners, as in the Brazilian Portuguese example in (1), they exhibit a systematic ambiguity (Saab 2022). On one reading the definite-description reading the DP refers to the unique individual satisfying the property denoted by the NP (in this case, being rural). On the other the epithet reading the descriptive property need not hold; it suffices that the referent have epistemically accessible properties that are contextually inferable from that property (e.g. driving a tractor, having a rural accent, wearing rural clothes).
(1) O jeca chegou.
??the JECA arrived
??The hillbilly arrived.
Prior analyses derive this split via structural ambiguity inside the DP (Patel-Grosz 2014; Orlando & Saab 2020, i.a.). In this talk I defend a structurally uniform alternative, where the interpretive differences between descriptive and epithet readings follow from two main ingredients: (i) an optional type-shifting operation encoded by a syntactic EX feature (Gutzmann 2019) and correlated with prosodic deaccenting (Umbach 2002) that moves NP content from the TC to the UC dimension; and (ii) the presence or absence of a pronominal index associated with the D head (Schwarz 2009; Jenks & Konate 2022). Under the epithet derivation, the NP property is mapped to a contextually determined superset that serves as a constraint on assignments for the index introduced by D; this mapping to a superset (defined by epistemically accessible properties) accounts for the misdescription tolerance characteristic of epithet readings. Because the property is shifted from the TC to the UC dimension where it is a function on contexts, it cannot address relevant QUDs. I show that the same interpretive mechanism also accounts for referential readings of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1966; Gutzmann & McCready 2014, i.a.). Drawing on novel Brazilian Portuguese data involving modification, iteration, binding, and ellipsis, I argue that this analysis is not only conceptually simpler but also more empirically adequate than structural-ambiguity accounts. A key consequence is that DP structure is essentially uniform across definites of all types (slurs, ordinary definites, epithets, and referential pronouns), with variation reducible to fully interpretive lexically-anchored features: whether D supplies a pronominal index, and whether triggers of UC-shifting (correlated with deaccenting) are present on NP nodes.