The syntax of quantification and focus in Chuj
Justin Royer, Cristina Buenrostro, Peter Jenks
November 2023
 

This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an [A′] feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an [A′] feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch a syntactic analysis of each type.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007733
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Submitted
keywords: syntax, quantification, focus, mayan, a-bar movement, predication
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