The syntax of quantification and focus in Chuj
Justin Royer, Cristina Buenrostro, Peter Jenks
April 2024 

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:	Accepted at Canadian Journal of Linguistics
keywords:	syntax, quantification, focus, mayan, a-bar movement, predication
previous versions:	v1 [November 2023]
Downloaded:	874 times

 

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