| Title: | Strong Indefinites are not Quantificational: Proportional many vs most |
| Author: | Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin |
| Publication: | Revue roumaine de linguistique, LVIII (4), p. 401-417 |
| p-ISSN: | 0035-3957 |
| Publisher: | Editura Academiei |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2013 |
| Abstract: | This paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and in particular of the proportional readings of many. Can we account for the proportional readings of many by assuming a uniform analysis, according to which many is a cardinality predicate, or do we need to postulate an ambiguity between a cardinality predicate and a quantificational determiner (Partee 1989)? I will argue in favour of the uniform analysis by comparing proportional most with proportional many: it will be shown that the former is necessarily a quantificational determiner (as in Generalized Quantifier theory, contra Hackl 2009), whereas the latter is a cardinality predicate inside a strong indefinite DP. This somewhat paradoxical result (a strong DP built with weak many) will be given a compositional semantics by assuming that constituents of the form many NP are headed by a null Determiner that has the semantics of plural some. |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 0
References in this publication: 1
| 15 | Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Ion Giurgea | The Suffixation of Definite Articles in Balkan Languages | RRL, LI (1), 73-103 | 2006 | pdf html |
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