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« Syntax Reading Group | Main | Undergrad Linguistics Club»

Semantics Reading Group

Today (May 4) is the final meeting of the SRG for this semester. The group will gather at Amy Rose's house at 8:00 pm. Andrew McKenzie is slated to report on his work on quantification in French and other languages. Check out the abstract below.

The group will also do some planning for the future, by asking:

  • What do we want to do in the future? (Perhaps address some of the puzzles for Krifka.)
  • Who would we like to invite for future semantics colloqs?

Abstract: On the attraction of Universal Quantifiers

Andrew McKenzie

I will discuss topics from my GP, which examines the locus of attraction of Universal Quantifiers (UQ). My main conclusion (based mainly on French data) is that a projection, OpP, attracts UQs from within vP. This runs counter to most of the syntactic literature, which assumes that quantifiers move to [Spec, vP] for interpretation. Evidence from PF and from LF demonstrate clearly that UQs need a site for interpretation above the vP level. This site, I propose, is OpP. But how far above vP is OpP? To answer this, I examine the preference of Universal Quantifiers in many languages to scope below sentential negation, resulting in a 'partial negation' reading. By placing OpP between vP and NegP, we not only derive this fact, but are able to draw together this preference and two other heretofore disparate aspects of the syntax of UQs: Quantifier float (Q-float) and Quantifier Raising/Lowering (QR/QL). The distributions of these three phenomena largely correlate with each other in French. That is, whenever Q-float is available, so is QR/QL, and the partial negation reading is enforced. By having the UQ obligatorily pass through OpP, this correlation follows naturally.

This is a syntax GP, but since it mainly involves the LF interface, I thought it might be helpful to discuss the semantic aspects of the paper, and maybe look at ways of expanding the domain of research. So far, I have looked at French and Turkish, where partial negation readings are practically necessary. In English and Hebrew, the high reading of the UQ is easily obtained, but greatly dispreferred to a negative quantifier. In languages like Japanese, though, and German, scrambling seems to provide the high reading with no trouble or markedness. So it may be interesting to discuss how the correlations I've found in French extend (or don't) to other languages.

[Thanks Florian!]

May 4, 2006 12:08 AM | 04:14 (2006-05-04) , semantics reading group