Open AccessOn the sentence-internal reading of French le même ('the same')
Author(s) -
Isabelle Charnavel
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v0i20.2567
Subject(s) - plural , definiteness , determiner , presupposition , linguistics , sentence , principle of compositionality , event (particle physics) , quantifier (linguistics) , reading (process) , existentialism , mathematics , computer science , philosophy , noun , epistemology , physics , quantum mechanics
This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French 'le même' and addresses two main issues: a- the problem of definiteness ('le même' does not behave the way standard definites do); b- the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that 'le même' needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it). I propose that: a- 'le même' is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity; b- 'le même' is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times. This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates 'même' to the notion of pluractionality.