Events and Countability

There is an emerging view according to which countability is not an integral part of the lexical meaning of singular count nouns, but is ‘added on’ or ‘made available’, whether syntactically, semantically or both. This view has been pursued by Borer and Rothstein among others in order to deal with classifier languages such as Chinese as well as challenges to standard views of the mass-count distinction such as object mass nouns such as furniture. I will discuss a range of data, partly from German, that such a grammar-based view of countability receives support when applied to verbs with respect to the event argument position. Verbs themselves fail to specify events as countable in English and related languages; instead countability is made available only by the use of the event classifier time or else particular lexical items, such as frequency expressions, German beides ‘both’, or the nominalizing light noun -thing. The paper will not adopt or elaborate a particular version of the grammar-based view of countability, but rather critically discuss existing versions and present two semantic options of elaborating the view

The syntactic and semantic roots of floating quantification

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-230).Through the study of floating quantifiers in a variety of languages, I demonstrate that floating quantification is not a uniform phenomenon and outline a series of puzzles that force us to adopt a two-part analysis. I argue that certain floating quantifiers are related to their nominal associate by syntactic transformation (the stranding approach, Sportiche 1988; Miyagawa 1989) and that others are related only semantically (the adverbial approach, Dowty and Brody 1984; Bobaljik 1995; Doetjes 1997). Evidence for this split comes from the syntactic distribution of these elements within and across languages and from two other points of difference. First, I show that each type of floating quantifier imposes a different restriction on the movement of its nominal associate. An adverbial floating quantifier restricts its associate to A-movement, while a stranded floating quantifier restricts its associate to A'-movement. Furthermore, these two classes of quantifiers divide along semantic lines: Adverbial floating quantifiers have exhaustive semantics, while stranded adnominal floating quantifiers are non-exhaustive. The analysis developed here provides an explanation for these syntactic and semantic differences.(cont.) The syntactic behavior is linked to the structural make-up of the two types of elements and to more general syntactic principles. I propose that quantifier stranding can only arise through A'-movement and that this restriction reflects a general ban on subphrasal extraction through A-movement. I suggest that this difference in locality conditions has roots in deeper differences between A- and A'-movement. My analysis of adverbial floating quantifier structure draws on Doetjes's (1997) analysis of adverbial floating quantifiers as containing a possibly null pronominal element. I extend this analysis to treat a variety of characteristics found with adverbial floating quantifiers, including agreement patterns, co-occurrence with pronouns, and locality conditions. The presence of this null pronominal is also argued to account for the observed A-movement restriction by disallowing cross-over via A'-movement. Thus the behavior of floating quantifiers can be used as a tool for the investigation of differences among movement types. The semantic differences that exist between types of floating quantifiers are tied to the syntax of partitivity. I argue that quantifier stranding can only arise via a partitive structure and that only non-exhaustive elements are eligible for this structure.(cont.) On the other hand, only exhaustive elements can take part in the structure that is required for adverbial quantifier float. The analysis not only provides a solution to the puzzle of floating quantification cross-linguistically, but raises other more general issues. In particular, the present analysis forces us to reevaluate the interplay of A- and A'-movement in a derivation. I show that in some cases a phrase that is generally assumed to undergo both A- and A'-movement in fact undergoes direct A'-movement. Thus floating quantification provides fertile ground for the investigation of differences and interactions between these two types of displacement. The results presented here should also provide a model for the analysis of other types of split constituency across languages.by Justin Michael Fitzpatrick.Ph.D

Where has the new information gone? : the chinese case

In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language. To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance

All about alles: The syntax of wh-quantifier float in German

This thesis offers an in-depth investigation of “wh-quantifier float” of the quantifying particle ‘alles’ in German. 'Alles' (etymologically, ‘all’) appears in wh-questions like 'Wen alles hat die Mare eingeladen?' (‘Who-all did Mare invite?’). The thesis focuses on the syntactic distribution of 'alles'. 'Alles' enjoys a wide distribution in the clause. It can occur both ‘adjacent’ to its ‘associate’ wh-phrase, and ‘distant’ from it, in various positions of the clause. I address three questions: What determines the distribution of 'alles'? Are adjacent 'alles' and ‘distal alles’ the same category? What licenses distal 'alles'? I answer these questions by arguing for a stranding analysis of distal 'alles': 'alles' and its associate form a first-Merge constituent, which is optionally separated in the course of the derivation through a process that involves movement ([WH alles] ⇒ [WH. . . [[WH alles]. . . ]]). The conclusion is compatible with prior analyses that argued for or assumed (a) constituency, and (b) a movement dependency in overt syntax. The conclusion is at odds with adverbial analyses, which assume that distal 'alles' is an adverbial. I provide two main empirical arguments. First, I argue against the idea that distal 'alles' and adjacent 'alles' are separate lexical items, or have different lexical content. Second, I argue that the “Chain Link Generalization” is the most accurate generalization for the distribution of 'alles': Given a derivation involving 'alles' and a licit associate, 'alles' may appear in any position which hosts an Abar-chain link of the associate, and in no other position. I show that 'alles' has “no distribution of its own in the clause”. Rather, the distribution of 'alles' depends on the potential distribution of its associate and can be predicted by the associate’s category, the associate’s base-position, the derivation that the associate undergoes in a given sentence. Conceptually, I argue that a stranding analysis is favored by simplicity as most generalizations established in this dissertation are directly entailed by it