Syntactic, semantic and information structures of floating quantifiers

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2016.25

Abstract

Quantifiers canonically attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva’s (2011) recent proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and information structure features of FQs within LFG’s projection architecture.

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2016-12-16

How to Cite

Otoguro, Ryo & Snijders, Liselotte. 2016. Syntactic, semantic and information structures of floating quantifiers. Proceedings of the Joint 2016 Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar 478–498. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2016.25) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/544) (Accessed March 28, 2024.)