Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages : Proceedings of the IV Nereus International Workshop

Abstract

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the IV NEREUS (http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/Nereus/) international workshop on the topic Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages, held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on October 9th and 10th, 2008.The main theme of the workshop was the relation between the semantic notion definiteness and the syntactic structure of the Determiner Phrase. Within this theme various specific topics were discussed during the workshop. One group of papers addressed the topic of definiteness and specificity: the notion of indefiniteness characteristic of object bare singular nominals in Spanish and Catalan, the interrelationship between (in)definiteness and word order, the interpretation of definite bare nouns in Romanian, the interrelationship between focus structure and nonspecificity in Spanish, definiteness and specificity in denominal verbs, and definiteness in adjective nominalizations in Spanish. Another group of papers dealt with the syntactic DP structure corresponding to different types of nominal projections in Old Romance, and the structure of vectorial bare NPs in Spanish. Finally, one paper was presented on the properties of adnominal adjectives in Romance at the morphologysemantics interface, and one on a semantic approach to the notion of differential object marking.Although some authors were not able to include their presentation in this volume (J.M. Brucart & Á. Gallego, M. García, and D. Jacob), we would like to thank all the contributors and participants at the workshop for their talks and interesting discussion.Finally, we would like to thank the institutions that contributed to the success of the workshop: Departament de Filologia Catalana. UAB; Departament de Filologia Espanyola. UAB; Departament de Lingüística. Universität Konstanz; Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge; Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Departamento de Filología. Universidad de Alcalá; Generalitat de Catalunya. AGAUR (2008ARCS100007); Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2007-31131-E); Vicerectorat d Economia. UAB