The syntax and semantics of approximate indefi nites in Spanish

• Autor(a) principal: Carranza, Fernando Martín
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Pérez, Carlos Muñoz
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/delta/article/view/52301
• topic: cardinal numbers; indefi nites; approximatives; Spanish

In Spanish, combining an indefi nite plural article and a cardinal number leads to an approximative interpretation similar to that provided by approximators like ‘approximately’. In this paper, we advance a syntactic and semantic analysis of these structures. We show that the construction shares a number of properties with structures containing explicit approximative elements, so it justifi ed to assume that a particular constituent contributes the approximative meaning. We propose that an approximative morpheme APPROX is combined with the cardinal number; the morphological realization of this morpheme is as the plural affi x on the indefi nite article. We advance a denotation for APPROX, and elaborate the necessary assumptions on the functioning of numerals for our analysis to work at a general level.