The Semantics of Determiners

le casei.
M. has seen a spot on wall.Def house.Gen
‘Maria saw a spot on the wall of the house.’

(ii) Maria a văzut o pată pe geamul casei.

M. has seen a spot on window.Def house.Gen
‘Maria saw a spot on the window of the house.’

18 The choices are not equal in the way the are in the case of ‘free choice’ items to be discussed below, where each choice verifies the sentence. Here only one makes the sentence true but the fact that it is that one rather than some other is immaterial.

19 Characterizing the distinction between the demonstrative determiner acest and the full demonstrative form acesta is beyond the scope of this chapter.

20 The pronoun is called a ‘donkey’ pronoun because of the classical example of this problem, given in (i) (with a slight, animal friendly modification):

(i) If a farmer owns a donkey he usually feeds it.

21 Exactly how to define the relevant syntactic relation called ‘c-command’ here is a matter of dispute but the details are not relevant to our concerns. The relation requires the antecedent to be ‘higher’ in the syntactic structure than the pronoun; the way to measure syntactic ‘height’ is under dispute but the fact that the indefinite does not c-command the pronoun in (45) is not disputed.

22 This view has its origins in Lewis (1975) and was transplanted for the analysis of indefinite generics in Farkas and Sugioka (1985).

23 This sentence can be understood generically as stating of the kind ‘dog’ the property that its realizations do not attack their owners, a generic statement that is arguably different from the type of generalization we have in (50).

24 The Romanian equivalent of the ‘just any’ use of any is yet another morpheme, oarecare, placed after the head noun:

(i) El nu e un student oarecare. E fiul decanului.

he not is a student Oare-any. Is son.the dean.Def.Dat
‘He is not just any student. He is the dean’s son.’

25 For a discussion of the bewildering array of ‘free choice’ items in Greek and French, for instance, see Vlachou (2007).