Denis Delfitto
Biographic Data
| ID | 1499103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Denis Delfitto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Denis |
| FAMILY NAME | Delfitto |
| SIGNATURE | DELFITTO D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Verona |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0468-1248 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Possessive binding in copular sentences and the logic of identification
Given the early nineteenth-century view according to which the copula is ambiguous between identity and predication, (pronominal) binding facts in copular structures have been taken to be evidence for a unified predicational analysis. This contribution supports the claim that binominal copulars are not ambiguous, while rejecting the familiar hypothesis that one of the DPs involved is necessarily a predicate. First, we show that binding of possess…
Copular Structures and Asymmetric Identity
We propose an analysis of copular structures of the type “DP is DP” based on the existence of a silent predicate of asymmetric identity. Our proposal is based on a cognitively grounded notion of identity as identification of one object on the basis of the properties of another. We argue that our proposal is preferable over Russell's view that the copula is ambiguous between a predicative interpretation (as in “Socrates is wise”) and an equative o…
Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
This paper revisits Pietroski’s challenge to truth-conditional semantics, focusing on his critique of Davidsonian event semantics in the case of mutual chases , which provide an intriguing exemplification of the complex interaction between logical forms and ambiguous contexts of utterance. Pietroski argues that truth-conditional analyses either collapse into contradiction or demand dubious metaphysical commitments, pushing us instead toward a pur…
Evaluative Morphology and the Syntax of Adjectives in Italian
This paper addresses a well-known puzzle at the intersection of morphology and syntax: the categorical exclusion of adjectives modified by evaluative morphology from prenominal position in Italian. While Italian allows many adjectives to occur both pre- and postnominally, adjectives like piccolino, 'little-dim', are strictly postnominal (cane piccolino, lit. 'dog little-dim' vs. *piccolino cane, 'little-dim dog'), a distribution not fully explain…
Bridging the Gap in Adult Dyslexia Research: Assessing the Efficacy of a Linguistic Intervention on Literacy Skills
While developmental dyslexia has been extensively studied in children, research on adults is still rather limited. This paper aims to bridge the gap in existing research by presenting the findings of a study that examined the reading and spelling skills of adults with dyslexia and assessed the effectiveness of a linguistic intervention designed to improve their literacy abilities. To address this issue, we first compared the profiles of 44 adults…
A contextual theory of fictional names
We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fictional texts require that the interpreter engages in a game of pretense of sort and are, therefore,…
Inflectional morphology: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia
It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the abil…
Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience
Expletive Negation
This chapter provides the state-of-the-art around expletive negation (EN), by discussing: (i) the relationship between EN and negative concord; (ii) EN as a real negation; (iii) EN as a special formative linked to an additional evaluative/expressive layer in the semantics of language. Moreover, the chapter offers a potentially unifying analysis of EN in comparative, exclamative, and temporal clauses: EN as an operator of implicature denial. This …
Beyond the Cartesian Divide
First-person and the semantic roots of Moore’s paradox
In this contribution, we argue that Moore's paradox has its roots in the semantics of first-person. We build up on some of Frege's concerns about the first-person, recently revived by Kripke as a criticism of the position according to which Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics is all is needed for an adequate semantics of the first-person. First, we discuss the so-called pragmatic approach to Moore's paradox, discussing its possible limitations, in…
Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties
This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of si…
Where syntax meets pragmatics: Varieties of de se and control structures
In this contribution, we offer an original analysis of the relation between control structures, de se readings and Immunity to Error through Misidentification. We propose that control structures are the result of an operation of Thematic Overwriting (TO), which conflates two thematic roles into one and delivers a logical representation whereby two properties are predicated of a unique argument. The account we propose explains a number of facts co…
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
Bare Nouns
Bare nouns (BNs) are noun phrases that are not introduced by a determiner. They have constituted a central case study into the logical form of natural language and one of the most challenging empirical domains for generally accepted hypotheses on the syntax/semantics interface. The main challenge they pose is in identifying the syntactic conditions that license them. It is by now clear that the distributional properties of BNs cannot be accounted…
Adverb Classes and Adverb Placement
Adverbs are one of the familiar categories of traditional grammar. Traditionally, adverbs are regarded as modifiers of verbs, in comparison with adjectives, which are regarded as modifiers of names. This view, however, runs into problems of both a syntactic and a semantic nature. On one hand, adverbs modify not only verbs but also predicates belonging to other syntactic categories. On the other hand, not all adverbs can be interpreted as predicat…
Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task
The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguists, though Banfield (1982) offered what is still the best syntactic description of the phenomenon, a…
Exclamatives: Issues of syntax logical form and interpretation
Person Features and Pronominal Anaphora
This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaphoric usage of first person indexicals (pronoun shifting) and logophoric pronouns. The results includ…
Towards a Diachronic Theory of Genitive Assignment in Romance
This chapter deals with the relevance of some cases of prepositionless genitives in Romance for a general theory of genitive assignment. It examines the peculiar properties of a specific class of Italian N+N compounds, identifying in the juxtaposition genitives of Old French, Occitan, and crucially Old Italian, the possible diachronic antecedent for such construction, which—it argues—is strictly intertwined with Romance construct state.
Universals and Semantics
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
A contextual theory of fictional names
We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fictional texts require that the interpreter engages in a game of pretense of sort and are, therefore,…
The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguists, though Banfield (1982) offered what is still the best syntactic description of the phenomenon, a…
Exclamatives: Issues of syntax logical form and interpretation
Person Features and Pronominal Anaphora
This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaphoric usage of first person indexicals (pronoun shifting) and logophoric pronouns. The results includ…
Universals and Semantics
Towards a Diachronic Theory of Genitive Assignment in Romance
This chapter deals with the relevance of some cases of prepositionless genitives in Romance for a general theory of genitive assignment. It examines the peculiar properties of a specific class of Italian N+N compounds, identifying in the juxtaposition genitives of Old French, Occitan, and crucially Old Italian, the possible diachronic antecedent for such construction, which—it argues—is strictly intertwined with Romance construct state.
Person Features and Pronominal Anaphora
This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaphoric usage of first person indexicals (pronoun shifting) and logophoric pronouns. The results includ…
Exclamatives: Issues of syntax logical form and interpretation
The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguists, though Banfield (1982) offered what is still the best syntactic description of the phenomenon, a…
Bare Nouns
Bare nouns (BNs) are noun phrases that are not introduced by a determiner. They have constituted a central case study into the logical form of natural language and one of the most challenging empirical domains for generally accepted hypotheses on the syntax/semantics interface. The main challenge they pose is in identifying the syntactic conditions that license them. It is by now clear that the distributional properties of BNs cannot be accounted…
Adverb Classes and Adverb Placement
Adverbs are one of the familiar categories of traditional grammar. Traditionally, adverbs are regarded as modifiers of verbs, in comparison with adjectives, which are regarded as modifiers of names. This view, however, runs into problems of both a syntactic and a semantic nature. On one hand, adverbs modify not only verbs but also predicates belonging to other syntactic categories. On the other hand, not all adverbs can be interpreted as predicat…
Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task
Where syntax meets pragmatics: Varieties of de se and control structures
In this contribution, we offer an original analysis of the relation between control structures, de se readings and Immunity to Error through Misidentification. We propose that control structures are the result of an operation of Thematic Overwriting (TO), which conflates two thematic roles into one and delivers a logical representation whereby two properties are predicated of a unique argument. The account we propose explains a number of facts co…
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties
This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of si…
Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience
Expletive Negation
This chapter provides the state-of-the-art around expletive negation (EN), by discussing: (i) the relationship between EN and negative concord; (ii) EN as a real negation; (iii) EN as a special formative linked to an additional evaluative/expressive layer in the semantics of language. Moreover, the chapter offers a potentially unifying analysis of EN in comparative, exclamative, and temporal clauses: EN as an operator of implicature denial. This …
Beyond the Cartesian Divide
First-person and the semantic roots of Moore’s paradox
In this contribution, we argue that Moore's paradox has its roots in the semantics of first-person. We build up on some of Frege's concerns about the first-person, recently revived by Kripke as a criticism of the position according to which Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics is all is needed for an adequate semantics of the first-person. First, we discuss the so-called pragmatic approach to Moore's paradox, discussing its possible limitations, in…
Inflectional morphology: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia
It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the abil…
Bridging the Gap in Adult Dyslexia Research: Assessing the Efficacy of a Linguistic Intervention on Literacy Skills
While developmental dyslexia has been extensively studied in children, research on adults is still rather limited. This paper aims to bridge the gap in existing research by presenting the findings of a study that examined the reading and spelling skills of adults with dyslexia and assessed the effectiveness of a linguistic intervention designed to improve their literacy abilities. To address this issue, we first compared the profiles of 44 adults…
A contextual theory of fictional names
We review some of the most prominent challenges in the semantics and pragmatics of fictional names and propose a pragmatic theory of fictional names whereby understanding a fictional name requires imagining possible contexts of interpretation of the name. Similarly to other pragmatic approaches to fiction and fictional contexts, we maintain that fictional texts require that the interpreter engages in a game of pretense of sort and are, therefore,…
Possessive binding in copular sentences and the logic of identification
Given the early nineteenth-century view according to which the copula is ambiguous between identity and predication, (pronominal) binding facts in copular structures have been taken to be evidence for a unified predicational analysis. This contribution supports the claim that binominal copulars are not ambiguous, while rejecting the familiar hypothesis that one of the DPs involved is necessarily a predicate. First, we show that binding of possess…
Copular Structures and Asymmetric Identity
We propose an analysis of copular structures of the type “DP is DP” based on the existence of a silent predicate of asymmetric identity. Our proposal is based on a cognitively grounded notion of identity as identification of one object on the basis of the properties of another. We argue that our proposal is preferable over Russell's view that the copula is ambiguous between a predicative interpretation (as in “Socrates is wise”) and an equative o…
Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
This paper revisits Pietroski’s challenge to truth-conditional semantics, focusing on his critique of Davidsonian event semantics in the case of mutual chases , which provide an intriguing exemplification of the complex interaction between logical forms and ambiguous contexts of utterance. Pietroski argues that truth-conditional analyses either collapse into contradiction or demand dubious metaphysical commitments, pushing us instead toward a pur…
Evaluative Morphology and the Syntax of Adjectives in Italian
This paper addresses a well-known puzzle at the intersection of morphology and syntax: the categorical exclusion of adjectives modified by evaluative morphology from prenominal position in Italian. While Italian allows many adjectives to occur both pre- and postnominally, adjectives like piccolino, 'little-dim', are strictly postnominal (cane piccolino, lit. 'dog little-dim' vs. *piccolino cane, 'little-dim dog'), a distribution not fully explain…
Linguistics (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Syntax (6 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (5 works)