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Something inner- and cross-linguistically different

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Abstract

Pronominal constructions such as something big, often referred to as the ‘indefinite pronoun construction’, have received different but often homogenous accounts in the literature. In this paper, I document the inner- and cross-linguistic diversity of this construction in German and some other languages. Highlighting respectively different sets of properties, I argue that there are three basic types: one type combines the adjective and the pronoun by complementation, another by adjunction, and a third involves a garden-variety DP. Adjunction is argued to be mediated by a Modifier Phrase (Rubin, E.J., Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, CSLI, Stanford, 429–439, 1996). The latter assumption is shown to have a number of advantages.

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  1. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of North Texas, P.O. Box 311127, Denton, TX, 76203, USA

    Dorian Roehrs

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Roehrs, D. Something inner- and cross-linguistically different. J Comp German Linguistics 11, 1–42 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-007-9016-7

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