Marked Indefinites
Overview
Typological research (Haspelmath 1997) showed that marked indefinites have a rich functional variety. In this lecture we will be mostly concerned with specificity (specific vs non-specific) and epistemic readings (known vs unknown). We will review the typological landscape of indefinites and examine the semantics proprieties of specific, non-specific and epistemic indefinites. We will then consider Aloni & Degano (2021)’s work, who provide a comprehensive framework to analyze such contrasts using tools from dependence logics and team semantics.