Floating Quantifiers in English and Their Semantic Composition

Floating Quantifiers in English and Their Semantic Composition
Hideharu Tanaka
May 2023

This paper reconsiders the nature of floating quantifiers (FQ) in English and proposes a strictly compositional semantic approach to their distribution. The new approach builds on Fitzpatrick's (2006) sketch of a "crossing" analysis, under which the semantic composition of a FQ is made possible by moving a co-indexed DP over the FQ. This idea is formally implemented by making a minor revision to Heim and Kratzer's (1998) Predicate Abstraction, and the revision allows the rule to apply to whatever nodes exist within a movement path. It is shown that the crossing analysis developed in this paper overcomes some empirical challenges to the stranding analysis (Sportiche 1988; Bošković 2004) and modifier analysis (Bobaljik 1995; Brisson 1998).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006779 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in the Proceedings of WCCFL 40
keywords:	stranding, modifier, crossing, null pronoun, predicate abstraction, movement, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [August 2022]
Downloaded:	413 times

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