Universal 1599:
- Original
- Every language has N’s and NPs of the type e → t (common nouns as predicates).
- Standardized
- Every language has N’s and NPs of the type e → t (common nouns as predicates).
- Keywords
- quantification, NP, DP, semantic type
- Domain
- syntax, semantics
- Type
- unconditional
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- absolute
- Basis
- unspecified
- Source
- Partee 2000: 5
- Counterexamples
1. “Partee 1987 proposed the basic DP types e (‘referential’), (‘predicative’) and <,t> (‘quantificational’) for English. […] DP’s in English are indeed associated with these three types. But there is growing evidence that in some languages NP’s or DP’s might only be associated with one or two of these types” (Partee 2000: 5). 2. Against the NP-Quantifier Universal (#1203) of Barwise & Cooper’s 1981, which argues that all NPs, cross-linguistically, are of <,t> type, i.e. quantificational (accepting the Montague´s proposal that for each syntactic istances of a DP there is only one sematic type, namely the quantifier type <,t>), Partee claims the need to distinguish N and NP (common noun phrase) on the one hand, and DP (determiner phrase) on the other hand, and to find out, also in a typological perspective, their default semantic type (##1603, 1604).3. Default type assignments for NP, DP are: (a) NP: (common noun phrase); (b) DP: e (referential DPs) and <,t> (DPs as generalized quantifiers, à la Montague).