Semantic Interpretation of Inuit Structures

Abstract

In this chapter, the seemingly exotic semantic facts of Inuit are shown to follow from the interaction of universal semantic principles (spelled out and motivated in sections 5 through 7 of chapter 1) with language-specific LF representations. For Inuit, the latter are derived (subject to the syntactic constraints discussed in section 7.1 of chapter 1) from s-structure representations which have already been motivated by independent syntactic evidence in chapters 1 and 2. The discussion focuses on the following semantic phenomena: default existential quantification (sec. 1), distributivity (sec. 2), semantic effects of argument raising at LF (sec. 3), and the semantic characteristics of nominative arguments (sec. 4).