Donka F Farkas
Biographic Data
| ID | 748394 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donka F Farkas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donka F |
| FAMILY NAME | Farkas |
| SIGNATURE | FARKAS D F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions
This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive, exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014), and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The intuition the account captures is that by marking…
Assessing alternatives: The case of the presumptive future in Italian
Polarity particles revisited
Claus et al. (2017) present novel experimental evidence concerning polarity particle responses in German, and discuss the challenges these findings raise for three approaches to such responses, namely the saliency approach of Krifka (20130, the feature model of Roelofsen and Farkas (2015), and the ellipsis approaches of Kramer and Rawlins (2012), and Holmberg (2016). The authors then sketch a way to account for the data within the feature model, …
Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives
This article presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar interrogatives are unmarked sentence types. …
Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions
This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of …
Question tags and sentential negativity
N-words and sentential negation: Evidence from polarity particles and VP ellipsis
A prominent treatment of n -words such as nobody and never is as indefinite expressions occurring in the scope of a covert sentential negation operator. This paper presents three experiments using two novel strategies based on polarity particles and VP ellipsis to test the predictions of this treatment of n -words. The first experiment tests a particular prediction of recent accounts of polarity particles with respect to agreeing responses to neg…
On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions
The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming…
The semantics and pragmatics of plurals
This paper addresses the semantics and pragmatics of singular and plural nominals in languages that manifest a binary morphological number distinction within this category. We review the main challenges such an account has to meet, and develop an analysis which treats the plural morpheme as semantically relevant, and the singular form as not contributing any number restriction on its own but acquiring one when in competition with the plural form.…
Article choice in plural generics
Specificity Distinctions
The notion of specificity in linguistics is notoriously non‐specific. We consider here various distinctions within the realm of noun phrase semantics that are relevant to specificity. The common thread uniting these distinctions is the notion of variation in value assignments for the variable introduced by the noun phrase. The distinctions concern the nature of the variation involved. The first part of the paper (section 2) is devoted to the defi…
Specificity distinction
This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinct…
On The Comparative And Absolute Readings Of Superlatives
Preverb Climbing in Hungarian
This paper offers an account of the distributional possibilities of Hungarian preverbal particles in the autolexical framework proposed in Sadock 1985. We show how a complex range of facts can be predicted from the interaction of a few independently motivated assumptions once autonomous modules of the grammar are allowed to assign partially noncongruent representations to the same linguistic entity. In the course of the discussion the Incorporati…
On the syntactic position of focus in Hungarian
Varieties of Formal Semantics: Proceedings of the 4th Amsterdam Colloquium, September 1982
Agreement and coordinate NPs
Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions
This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of …
On The Comparative And Absolute Readings Of Superlatives
On the syntactic position of focus in Hungarian
Question tags and sentential negativity
Article choice in plural generics
Agreement and coordinate NPs
Preverb Climbing in Hungarian
This paper offers an account of the distributional possibilities of Hungarian preverbal particles in the autolexical framework proposed in Sadock 1985. We show how a complex range of facts can be predicted from the interaction of a few independently motivated assumptions once autonomous modules of the grammar are allowed to assign partially noncongruent representations to the same linguistic entity. In the course of the discussion the Incorporati…
Agreement and coordinate NPs
On the syntactic position of focus in Hungarian
Varieties of Formal Semantics: Proceedings of the 4th Amsterdam Colloquium, September 1982
Preverb Climbing in Hungarian
This paper offers an account of the distributional possibilities of Hungarian preverbal particles in the autolexical framework proposed in Sadock 1985. We show how a complex range of facts can be predicted from the interaction of a few independently motivated assumptions once autonomous modules of the grammar are allowed to assign partially noncongruent representations to the same linguistic entity. In the course of the discussion the Incorporati…
On The Comparative And Absolute Readings Of Superlatives
Specificity distinction
This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinct…
Specificity Distinctions
The notion of specificity in linguistics is notoriously non‐specific. We consider here various distinctions within the realm of noun phrase semantics that are relevant to specificity. The common thread uniting these distinctions is the notion of variation in value assignments for the variable introduced by the noun phrase. The distinctions concern the nature of the variation involved. The first part of the paper (section 2) is devoted to the defi…
Article choice in plural generics
On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions
The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming…
The semantics and pragmatics of plurals
This paper addresses the semantics and pragmatics of singular and plural nominals in languages that manifest a binary morphological number distinction within this category. We review the main challenges such an account has to meet, and develop an analysis which treats the plural morpheme as semantically relevant, and the singular form as not contributing any number restriction on its own but acquiring one when in competition with the plural form.…
N-words and sentential negation: Evidence from polarity particles and VP ellipsis
A prominent treatment of n -words such as nobody and never is as indefinite expressions occurring in the scope of a covert sentential negation operator. This paper presents three experiments using two novel strategies based on polarity particles and VP ellipsis to test the predictions of this treatment of n -words. The first experiment tests a particular prediction of recent accounts of polarity particles with respect to agreeing responses to neg…
Question tags and sentential negativity
Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions
This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of …
Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives
This article presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar interrogatives are unmarked sentence types. …
Polarity particles revisited
Claus et al. (2017) present novel experimental evidence concerning polarity particle responses in German, and discuss the challenges these findings raise for three approaches to such responses, namely the saliency approach of Krifka (20130, the feature model of Roelofsen and Farkas (2015), and the ellipsis approaches of Kramer and Rawlins (2012), and Holmberg (2016). The authors then sketch a way to account for the data within the feature model, …
Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions
This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive, exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014), and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The intuition the account captures is that by marking…
Assessing alternatives: The case of the presumptive future in Italian
Linguistics (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (13 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Mathematics (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Sentence (5 works)