Indeterminate pronouns in Old English: a compositional semantic analysis
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Indeterminate pronouns in Old English: a compositional semantic analysis Sigrid Beck1
Received: 31 August 2018 / Accepted: 18 October 2019 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Indeterminate pronouns in Old English (expressions like hwa ‘who/what’ and hwelc ‘which’) permit several interpretations in addition to their use as interrogative pronouns, for example readings as universal or existential quantifiers. They combine with morphological prefixes (ge- ‘and, also’ and a- ‘always, ever’), which change the range of possible interpretations. Old English indeterminate pronouns are shown to contribute a crosslinguistically hitherto unattested pattern of available interpretations. In particular, bare indeterminate pronouns have a universal interpretation and ge-indeterminate pronouns can be both universal and existential. This paper offers an alternative semantic analysis in the spirit of Hamblin (Found Lang 10:41–53, 1973) and Shimoyama (Nat Lang Semant 14:139–173, 2006). A compositional semantics is given for the pronouns and the prefixes, which derives the available readings. The paper ends with a proposal for compositional semantic change relating Old English indeterminate pronouns to their modern descendants. Keywords Old English Indeterminate pronouns Alternative semantics Quantification Semantic change
1 Introduction This paper offers a compositional semantic analysis of the interpretations of indeterminate pronouns in Old English (OE).
& Sigrid Beck [email protected] 1
Universita¨t Tu¨bingen, Tu¨bingen, Germany
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S. Beck
Indeterminate pronouns, a term I use here in the sense of Shimoyama (2001) and Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002) (going back to Kuroda 1965), are pronominal expressions with typical uses as interrogative wh-pronouns. Frequently they, or morphological derivations based on them, have other uses, e.g. as indefinites, NPIs or universals. I provide an example from Japanese in (1) (from Shimoyama 2001) and an example from Latvian in (2) (from Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). The term indeterminate pronoun, as opposed to interrogative pronoun, highlights that the pronoun can participate in other interpretations besides question interpretations. (1) a. Yoko-wa dono hon-o yomimasita ka? Yoko-Top which book-Acc read Q ‘Which book did Yoko read?’ b. Yoko-wa dono hon-mo yonda. Yoko-Top which book-MO read ‘Yoko read every book.’ (Shimoyama 2001) (2) a. b. c. d.
kur ‘where’ kaut kur ‘somewhere’ ne-kur ‘anywhere’ (in the immediate scope of negation) jeb-kur ‘anywhere’ (NPI and FCI) (after Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002)
Present Day English (PDE) wh-pronouns do not have uses as universal or existential expressions. But PDE’s ancestor Old English (OE)1 had proper indeterminate pronouns, with derived forms and several possible interpretations. These forms and interpretations make them interesting semantically. I illustrate in (3) the relevant forms of hwa ‘who, what’2: in addition to the bare indeterminate pronoun (3a), there is a form with the prefix ge- ‘and, also’ ge-hwa (3b) and a f
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