On the sentence-internal reading of French le même ('the same')

Abstract

This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French le même and addresses two main issues: a- the problem of definiteness (le même does not behave the way standard definites do); b- the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that le même needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it). I propose that: a- le même is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity; b- le même is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times. This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates même to the notion of pluractionality.