Cornelia Ebert - Böcker

Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour.The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems.The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour.The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems.The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites. The papers explore differences and similarities among these specificity markers, concentrating on the following issues: whether specificity is a purely semantic or also a pragmatic notion; whether the contribution of specificity markers is located on the level of the at-issue content; whether some kind of speaker-listener asymmetry concerning the identification of the referent is involved; and the behavioral scope of these indefinites in the context of other quantifiers, negation, attitude verbs, and intensional/modal operators.