Speaker: Luciana Sanchez Mendes (Universidade Federal Fluminense, CNPq, Faperj) and Ana Clara Polakof (Universidad de la República, SNI)
Title: Expressive interpretation of exclamative indefinites in Brazilian Portuguese and Rioplatense Spanish
Date: Thu 9 Nov
Location: Lipsius 2.17
Time: 16:15–17:30
The focus of this talk is to present a semantic analysis of exclamative indefinites in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and in Rioplatense Spanish (RpS) in sentences like (1) and (2). Both data can be used in both languages.
(1) O Pedro comprou UMA CASA. (BP)
the Pedro bought ind.fem.sg house
‘Pedro bought a house (a special one).’ (Sanchez-Mendes, 2013)
(2) ¡El niño es UN VIVARACHO! (RpS)
the child is one smart
‘How smart the child is!’(= ¡Qué vivaracho (que) es el niño!) (Masullo, 2017, 109)
We follow Castroviejo’s (2007, for Catalan) and Rett’s (2008, 2011, for English) treatment of overt exclamatives and Masulo’s (2007, for Spanish) proposal for covert exclamatives and assume that these data involve a degree construction. Additionally, we assume that the high degree expressed by them involves an expressive component that is associated with a conventional implicature (as Castroviejo, 2008 forwh-exclamatives) rather than a quantity implicature (Rett, 2015).
Our formal analysis is based on Masullo’s (2017) proposal for Spanish, that covert exclamatives have an extreme degree feature associated with a Degree Phrase. We assume that this extreme degree evokes an evaluative intonation that encodes expressive content (CI) (Castroviejo, 2008) that, in the case of indefinites, is due to the presence of uninterpretable and interpretable expressive features (à la Gutzmann, 2019). The uninterpretable expressive feature is provided by a scalar lexical category that is the complement of the extreme degree phrase that will be the gradable noun in cases such as vivaracho (RpS) and an omitted adjective in cases of non-gradable nouns, such as casa (BP). In the case of gradable nouns, the interpretable feature is located with the exclamative since the indefinite article emulates the role of an intensifier. In the case of non-gradable nouns, the interpretable feature is present in the indefinite itself that projects a DP.