piñón: definiteness effect verbs

abstract

I argue for an analysis of definiteness effect verbs in Hungarian in which verbs that participate in the definiteness effect are considered to be 'systematically polysemous' in that their so-called definiteness effect meaning is simply one of two or more meanings that they have. Focusing on their definiteness effect meaning, the leading idea is that there is both uniformity and diversity in the semantics of these verbs. The uniformity is seen in the idea that every definiteness effect verb introduces a novel discourse referent corresponding to its direct internal argument. The diversity is revealed in the idea that although every definiteness effect verb specifies an 'end condition' that comes to hold of its internal argument, the exact value of this end condition varies across subclasses of definiteness effect verbs, hence there is no single end condition that does duty for all definiteness effect verbs.

note

I have another (loosely related) paper, "Weak and strong accomplishments", in the same volume.

reference

download "Definiteness effect verbs"

There are two versions available. The first is the final version that I formatted, dating from 26 Jan. 2006: The second is the pre-final proof of the paper, formatted by a typesetter in India, dating from 8 May 2006: The two versions are essentially the same as far as the text is concerned. The formatting of the proof is very different from the formatting of my version—this is thanks to Springer for having given us an irrelevant style sheet to follow. The other matter is typos: the typesetter introduced a huge number of typos (no exaggeration) in the first proof (that weren't present in my version), which I had to painstakingly correct in an email message (no fun). Happily, these are corrected in the pre-final proof, which very closely approximates the published version.

By the way, here is the pre-final proof of the references for the whole volume, dating from 9 March 2006 (the references aren't included in the pre-final proof of the paper):

go to my cover page for papers
piñón: definiteness effect verbs
last updated on 8 aug 07
christopher piñón (pinon AT sdf HYPHEN eu DOT org)

http://pinon.sdf-eu.org/covers/dev.html