Two types of weak determiners: evidence from Spanish

Weak determiners have both a presuppositional and a non presuppositional reading. Two ways of accounting for this fact have been proposed. The Ambiguity Approach (Partee 1989, Diesing 1992, de Hoop 1992) posits that weak determiners are ambiguous. The Pragmatic Approach (Büring 1996) claims that we do not need to postulate an ambiguity in the semantics: the presuppositional reading arises as a result of presuppositions triggered by topic/focus marking. In this paper we explore the possibility that both theories are needed. We present as evidence the behavior of two Spanish weak determiners, unos and algunos. Algunos can get a presuppositional reading independently of topic/focus marking, as predicted by the Ambiguity Approach. Unos, on the other hand, exhibits the behavior predicted by the Pragmatic Approach: it is presuppositional only when marked either as contrastive topic or as focus. 1. The Ambivalent Behavior of Weak Determiners Weak determiners have both a presuppositional and a non-presuppositional reading. Take, for instance, some. In a situation where the existence of a group of children is presupposed, the sentence in (1) says that a subgroup of them entered the garden (as opposed, presumably, to other members of the group). In that case, (1) can be paraphrased as ‘some of the children entered the garden’. The sentence in (1) can also be used in a situation where no group of children is contextually relevant. In such a situation, (1) says that an unspecified number of children entered the garden. When (1) has the former interpretation, some is stressed; when it has the latter interpretation it is unstressed and reduced (sm). (1) Some children entered the garden * We would like to thank Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Previous versions of this work were presented at the Proseminar on Existential Sentences held at UMass in the Spring of 2002. We are very grateful to the participants in that seminar for most useful discussions. Thanks also to Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach who kindly sent us his 2001 paper. It goes without saying that all errors are ours