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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on December 18, 2006
Journal of Semantics 2007 24(1):1-25; doi:10.1093/jos/ffl010
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Restoring Indefinites to Normalcy: An Experimental Study on the Scope of Spanish algunos

Luisa Martí

CASTL/Universitetet i Tromsø

Correspondence: LUISA MARTÍ, Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL), Faculty of Humanities, Universitetet i Tromsø, NO-9037 Tromsø, Norway. e-mail: luisa.marti{at}hum.uit.no


  Abstract

It is widely assumed that the scope of indefinites is island insensitive, i.e., that, generally, an indefinite inside of a syntactic island, such as an adjunct clause, is capable of taking scope outside of that island. This paper challenges this assumption by studying the scope behaviour of the Spanish plural indefinite algunos (roughly, ‘some (pl.)’). It presents an experimental study that shows that the scope of algunos is not free and depends on its syntactic environment, at least in the dialect of Spanish studied here. The paper discusses some of the implications of the study for current theories of indefinite scope: it points out the problems that choice functions and singleton indefinites have with the Spanish data, and it also discusses the implications for Schwarzschild's (2002) solution to the so-called ‘Donald Duck’ problem.


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