Adverbial Quantification and (Un)Reducibility: The 'Quantification at a Distance' Construction in French

Adverbial Quantification and (Un)Reducibility: The 'Quantification at a Distance' Construction in French
Heather Burnett
March 2010

In this paper, I present a compositional semantic analysis of the Quantification at a Distance (QAD) construction in the standard dialect of European French. I argue that quantification in a QAD sentence is done by a binary adverbial quantifier over the verbs event argument and the direct object argument at the same time. I argue that the modeling of the interpretations assigned to QAD sentences necessarily involves a polyadic quantifier, since such a quantifier is unreducible to any iterations of unary quantifiers. I provide a compositional analysis of the construction based on previous treatments of the indefinites that appear in it as semantically incorporated nominals.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/001103 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Sarah Zobel & Viola Schmitt (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14, University of Vienna
keywords:	quantification, polyadic, french, adverbs, semantics, syntax, semantics
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