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Quantification, Misc QUANTIFICATION, MISC. A Dissertation Presented by JAN ANDERSSEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2011 Linguistics c Copyright by Jan Anderssen 2011 All rights reserved QUANTIFICATION, MISC. A Dissertation Presented by JAN ANDERSSEN Approved as to style and content by Angelika Kratzer, Chair Lyn Frazier, Member Christopher Potts, Member Charles Clifton, Jr., Member John J. McCarthy Head of Department Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS That I have finished this dissertation is in large parts due to the guidance, patience, and encouragement of my committee members. It amazes me how tirelessly they have cleared all the stumbling blocks I sometimes threw in my own way. I am indebted first and foremost to my Doktormutter, Angelika Kratzer. My views on linguistics, and semantics in particular are shaped by Angelika’s writing, teaching, and advising. The introductory classes that I took with Angelika during my visiting year at UMass were the main reason for me to apply there without hesitation. I have never regretted this. What I have learned extends beyond the linguistic horizon. I was fortunate to have an outstanding dissertation committee, and I am very grateful to Lyn Frazier, Chris Potts, and Chuck Clifton for being on my committee, and for being generous with their time and feedback throughout not only the time of my dissertation writing, but the entire time I have known them. That I have enjoyed these years in graduate school no matter how frustrating the work might have seemed at times is entirely due to a great many good friends near and far. I consider myself very lucky for all the people I have met at every place I have been to. At every place, some have become good friends. It is in the sad nature of departing that each new place comes with an ever growing number of places left behind. I hope to stay close to the people even if the places are far. I am fully aware that I wouldn’t be writing these acknowledgments without all of their support. I believe that most if not all who have at some point written or attempted to write a dissertation will to some extent share the sentiment that I express when I say I am sorry to everyone who had to be involved in the stormy parts of this Odyssey in any way, academically or personally. I am grateful beyond words for the kindness, friendship, patience, help and advice that I have received from all of you. I thank you dearly and deeply for this. iv ABSTRACT QUANTIFICATION, MISC. SEPTEMBER 2011 JAN ANDERSSEN Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Angelika Kratzer This dissertation investigates various topics concerning the interpretation of deter- miner phrases and their connection to individual entities. The first chapter looks at a phenomenon called telescoping, in which a quantificational expression appears to bind a pronominal form across sentence boundaries, at odds with commonly assumed and well motivated constraints on binding. I investigate the limited circumstances under which telescoping is available and argue that the mechanism that makes it available should respect said locality constraints. In particular, I argue that the impression of co-variation arises not because of binding by the initial quantificational expression, but because an of independent, albeit unpronounced, quantificational operator in the second sentence. I will show cases where the domains of these two quantificational operators are independent, incompatible with approaches that assume a single operator. This result also entails that no reference to constructed individuals, e.g. prototypical or average individuals is needed. In the second chapter, I look at the German lexical item lauter and argue that DPs headed by lauter are purely predicational. After presenting an overview of the various kinds of interpretations that a DP can receive, and some discussion objecting to the idea of treating these as cases of lexical ambiguity, I show data that illustrate that lauter DPs cannot receive many of these interpretations. At the end of the chapter, I speculate about ways in which purely predicative DPs may appear and be interpreted in some, but not all, positions that arguments typically occupy, resulting in a restricted distribution and less freedom in the range of v interpretations. In the last chapter, I look at an instance of a semantically complex determiner, the English item any. Instead of adding to the discussion based on an investigation of any, I propose that this hidden semantic complexity has a transparent reflex in German, where the lexical item überhaupt spells out a logically independent part of the proposed meaning of any, namely its domain widening meaning. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................... iv ABSTRACT ...................................... v NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS.......................... x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION................................. 1 1.1 Overview................................... 1 1.2 Quantification and generalized quantifier theory............ 4 1.2.1 Early treatments of quantification................. 4 1.2.2 The advance of quantification in logical languages....... 5 1.2.3 The onset of the linguistic study of quantification ....... 7 1.2.4 Generalized quantifier theory................... 8 2 QUANTIFIER SCOPE AND TELESCOPING ................. 11 2.1 Main questions ............................... 15 2.1.1 Constraints on the distribution of telescoping.......... 15 2.1.2 Theoretical implications ...................... 16 2.2 The restrictor accommodation approach................. 19 2.2.1 Modal subordination........................ 19 2.2.2 Telescoping as restrictor accommodation ............ 21 2.3 Arguments against competing proposals................. 23 2.3.1 Telescoping is not true subordination .............. 23 2.3.2 Arguments against the e-type approach............. 30 2.4 Shortcomings of the restrictor accommodation proposal . 34 2.5 Telescoping requires non-accidental generalizations.......... 37 2.6 Acceptability ratings of telescoping discourses ............. 40 2.7 Non-accidentality and preserving the scope constraint......... 45 2.7.1 Genericity and non-accidentality................. 48 vii 2.8 Generic statements, situation semantics and telescoping . 55 2.8.1 Situation semantics......................... 56 2.8.2 Telescoping ............................. 58 2.9 Summary and open questions....................... 62 3 LAUTER AND THE INTERPRETATION OF DPS............... 66 3.1 Lauter ..................................... 66 3.2 A weak meaning for lauter ......................... 73 3.3 Lauter has no pronominal form ...................... 84 3.3.1 The stranding prohibition..................... 84 3.3.2 The partitive restriction ...................... 92 3.3.3 What unifies the environments?.................. 97 3.4 DP interpretation and reference...................... 99 3.5 On the range of interpretations of DPs..................103 3.5.1 Existential quantification and merely cardinal interpretations 103 3.5.2 Milsark’s strong and weak distinction . 106 3.5.3 Partitive or proportional interpretations.............111 3.5.4 Specific readings of weak DPs...................114 3.5.5 Generic readings ..........................118 3.5.6 Quantificational variability effects . 123 3.6 A unified semantics.............................124 3.6.1 The connection between position and interpretation . 125 3.6.2 The interpretation of topics ....................137 3.7 Distributional characteristics of lauter DPs . 140 3.7.1 Subject effects with lauter DPs...................140 3.7.2 Word order effects .........................143 3.7.3 The wasfür split ...........................144 3.7.4 Other environments ........................146 3.8 Lauter DPs obligatorily reconstruct ....................147 3.8.1 German V2 and reconstruction ..................149 3.8.2 Scrambling..............................162 3.9 Lauter DPs are obligatorily weak .....................163 3.9.1 Predicate nominals.........................166 3.9.2 Predicates in argument positions . 171 4 ÜBERHAUPT ...................................174 viii 4.1 Introduction and background.......................174 4.1.1 Negative polarity, domain widening, and strengthening . 175 4.2 Widening quantifier domain restrictions . 178 4.2.1 Überhaupt and indefinite DPs ...................179 4.2.2 Überhaupt and universal quantifiers . 182 4.3 Removing restrictions cross-categorically . 183 4.3.1 Modifying comparison classes ..................183 4.3.2 Contextual restrictions on verbal domains . 186 4.3.3 Targeting conversational backgrounds . 188 4.4 Summary and open ends..........................189 APPENDICES A EXPERIMENTAL MATERIALS.........................191 B LAUTER VORFELD SUBJECTS.........................195 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................197 ix NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS Grammaticality judgments I use the following convention to indicate gram- maticality judgments of the sentences used as data points in this thesis. Unless indicated otherwise, for the German data, these judgments rely on my own intu- ition and limited informal surveys of other native-speakers. For this reason, no quantitative measure of certainty is reported. Examples taken from the literature are reported with the judgments given there. An examples without any prefixed symbols is perceived as grammatical. * An examples prefixed with an asterisk symbol is perceived as ungrammatical.
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