Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
Introduction
References

Some Notes on the Syntax of Quantity

Profile image of Hagit BorerHagit Borer
https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3033-9_3
visibility

…

description

27 pages

link

1 file

Abstract
sparkles

AI

This paper explores the syntax of quantity, emphasizing the parallels between nominal and event structures. It discusses how telicity in events is linked to the syntactic representation of quantity within the nominal domain, particularly through the introduction of the Quantity Phrase (#P). Key contributions include an analysis of the functional projections related to quantity and their implications for understanding nominal and event syntax.

Related papers

Numerals and quantifiers in X-bar syntax and their semantic interpretation ISBN 90 6196 213 7
Henk Verkuyl

Formal Methods in the Study of Language, edited by J.A.G, Groenendijk, T.M.V. Janssen and M.B.J. Stokhof, 1981

This paper purports to contribute to the solution of a problem that can be described in two ways. The first is: 'Can we provide Montague- grammar with a syntax satisfying wel l-established needs of linguists? ' . The second is : ' Can we provide Chomsky-grammar with a semantics satisfying well-recognized wishes of logical semanticists?'. Part of the problem is simply deny that there is a problem at all, given the divergent respective enterprises . Nevertheless , several attempts have been made to bridge the gap . The aim of my paper is to "categorialize" the generative X-syntax such that it can provide a suitable basis for PTQ-semantics, maintaining its descriptive and explanatory force for linguistic purposes .

View PDFchevron_right
Semantic Aspects of Quantity
Judah L Schwartz
View PDFchevron_right
Attributive Quantity Words as Nonrestrictive Modifiers
Stephanie Solt

semanticsarchive.net

View PDFchevron_right
Restricted nominalism about number and its problems
Stewart Shapiro

Synthese, 2024

Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls "internalism" with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstracta exist, it precludes the existence of natural numbers, thus establishing what he calls "restricted nominalism" about natural numbers. We argue that Hofweber's internalism fails to establish restricted nominalism. Not only is his primary argument for restricted nominalism invalid, the analysis of quantification proposed threatens to collapse internalism into either a traditional form of error theory or realism.

View PDFchevron_right
Quantificational Modification: The Semantics of Totality and Proportionality
Zaina Hafiz Tsouhlaris

2011

The thesis explores the syntactic and semantic dimensions of four linguistic elements that appear in Modern Greek arguably as quantifiers and modifiers, i.e., in the form of Quantificational Modifiers (QMods) olos 'all, whole, overall' and its extension olikos 'total', merikos 'some, a few, partial', ligos 'some, few, little, insignificant' and polls 'many, great, considerable'. Such QMods are analyzed as 'measure' quantifiers of scalar semantics that appeal' in a syntactic position common to adjectival modifiers. The thesis explores specific sets of reading and their interpretations. Such a phenomenon is common to Modern Greek, English, French and Arabic QMods and gives evidence to the universality of Quantificational Modification as a semantic subclass of Quantification. Chapter 1 discusses Quantification as semantic interpretation along with the main questions this research intends to answer, while Chapter 2 reviews recent liter...

View PDFchevron_right
Introduction. The semantics of nominals
M.Teresa Espinal

Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2004

* We would like to thank all the contributors for their papers and for their cooperation during the editing process. We are also very grateful to all of our referees, who provided careful and very helpful comments on the papers. Finally, thanks to Tom Rozario for his help with the preparation of the manuscripts.

View PDFchevron_right
ON THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF NUMBER
Viviane Deprez
View PDFchevron_right
Quantity and Quantification
Daniel Bonevac

Noûs, 1985

View PDFchevron_right
Nominalizations: new insights and theoretical implications
Elena Soare

Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 2011

View PDFchevron_right
On the logic of nominalized predicates and its philosophical interpretations
Nino B Cocchiarella

Erkenntnis, 1978

View PDFchevron_right

References (44)

  1. Bach, Emmon. 1986. "The algebra of events." Linguistic and Philosophy 9: 5-16
  2. Benua, Laura and Hagit Borer. 1996. "The passive/anti-passive alternation." Paper presented at GLOW, Athens, April 1996.
  3. Borer, Hagit. 1994. "The projection of arguments". In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 17, E. Benedicto and J. Runner (eds). Amherst: GLSA, University of Massachusetts.
  4. Borer, Hagit. 1998. "Passive without theta grids". In Morphology and its Relations to Phonology and Syntax ed., S. Lapointe, P. Farrell and D. Brentari. Stanford: CSLI Borer, Hagit. to appear. Structuring Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. Doetjes, Jenny and Martin Honcoop. 1997. "The semantics of event-related readings: A case for pair quantification", in Anna Szabolcsi Ed. 263-310.
  6. Dowty, David. R. 1991. "Thematic proto-roles and argument selection." Language 67:547-619
  7. Filip, Hana. 1992. "Aspect and interpretation of nominal arguments." In Papers from the Twenty-eight Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 139-158. Chicago.
  8. Filip, Hana. 1993. Aspect, Situation Types and Nominal Reference. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Published in 1999 by Garland Publishing.
  9. Filip, Hana. 1996. "Domain restrictions on lexical quantifiers." Ms. University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign
  10. Filip, Hana. 2000. "The quantization puzzle. In Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky, eds.
  11. Frege, Gottlob. 1950. (1884) The Foundation of Arithmetic. Oxford: Blackwell.
  12. Greuder, William and Miriam Butt. 1998. The Projection of Arguments. Stanford: CSLI.
  13. Higginbotham, James. 2000. "On the representation of telicity". Ms. University of Oxford.
  14. Hout, Angeliek, van. 1992. "Linking and projection based on event structure". Manuscript, Tilburg: Tilburg University.
  15. Hout, Angeliek, van. 1996. Event Semantics of Verb Frame Alternations TILDIL Dissertation Series, 1996-1.
  16. Kiparsky, Paul. 1996. "Partitive case and aspect." Ms. Stanford University, Stanford, California Kiparsky, Paul. 1998. "Partitive case and aspect." In Greuder, William and Miriam Butt, eds.
  17. Kratzer, Angelika. 1994. The Event Argument, ms., Amherst: University of Massachusetts.
  18. Krifka, Manfred. 1989. "Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics," In Renate Bartsch, John van Benthem, and Peter van Emde Boas (eds.) Semantics and Contextual Expressions, Dordrecht: Foris.
  19. Krifka, Manfred. 1990. "4000 ships passed through the lock", Linguistics and Philosophy 13(5): 487-520.
  20. Krifka, Manfred. 1992. "Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution." In Ivan A. Sag and Anna Szablocsi (eds.) Lexical Matters. Stanford: CSLI
  21. Krifka, Manfred. 1998. "The origins of telicity." In Susan Rothstein (ed.) 197-235.
  22. Li, Charles .N. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Cinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  23. Li, Y.-H. Audrey. 1998. "Argument determiner phrases and number phrases." Linguistic Inquiry 29: 693-702.
  24. Link, Godehard. 1983. "The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice-theoretic approach." In Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language. ed. R. Bäuerle, C. Schwarze, and A. von Stechow. 303- 323. Berlin: De Gruyter.
  25. Muromatsu, Keiko. 1998. On the Syntax of Classifiers. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.
  26. Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. A Study in Subatomic Semantics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
  27. Pesetsky, David. 1982. Paths and Categories. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
  28. Platzack, Christer. 1979. The Semantic Interpretation of Aspect and Aktionsarten. Dordrecht: Foris.
  29. Ritter, Elizabeth. 1991. "Two functional categories in Noun Phrases: Evidence from Modern Hebrew," in Perspectives on Phrase Structure, Syntax and Semantics 25: 37-62. New York: Academic Press.
  30. Ritter, Elizabeth. 1995. "On the syntactic category of pronouns and agreement." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13: 355-404.
  31. Ritter, Elizabeth. and Sarah Rosen. 1998. "Delimiting events in syntax". In Greuder, William and Miriam Butt (eds). 97-134.
  32. Rothstein, Susan. 1998. ed. Events and Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  33. Rothstein, Susan. 2000. "What are incremental themes?" Ms. Bar-Ilan University.
  34. Schein, Barry. 2002. "Events and the semantic content of thematic relations". In Logical Form and Language, ed. Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter, published by Clarendon Press, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 263-344.
  35. Schmitt, Christina, J. 1996. Aspect and the Syntax of Noun Phrases. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.
  36. Schoorlemmer, Maaika. to appear. "Syntactic unaccusativity in Russian." In Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Martin Everaert, eds.
  37. Schoorlemmer, Maaike. 1995. Participial passive and Aspect in Russian. Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University. Utrecht: LED Publishers.
  38. Tenny, Carol. 1987. Grammaticalizing Aspect and Affectedness. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface, Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  39. Verkuyl, Henk, J. 1972. On the Compositional Nature of the Aspect. Dordrecht: Reidel.
  40. Verkuyl, Henk, J. 1989. "Aspectual classes and aspectual composition." Linguistic and Philosophy 12: 39-94
  41. Verkuyl, Henk, J. 1993. A Theory of Aspectuality. The interaction between Temporal and Atemporal Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  42. Verkuyl, Henk, J. 1999. "Events as dividuals: Aspectual composition and event semantics." In Higginbotham, James, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi. (eds.).
  43. Zucchi, Sandro and Michael White. 2001. "Twigs, sequences and the temporal constitution of predicates." Linguistics and Philosophy 24: 187-222.
  44. Hagit Borer Department of Linguistics University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693 USA borer@usc.edu

Related papers

QUANTITY INTERPRETATION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Svetlana N. Stepanenko, Olga V. Fedotova

Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 2022

The present paper deals with the issues pertaining to the role of language in the quantity inter-pretation process in modern English. The authors attempt to describe the language means of quantity interpretation at different linguistic levels to show the level peculiarities of quantity interpretation in each case. To prove that the process of linguistic quantity interpretation is integrative and multiple-factor at different language levels, the authors execute the analysis of the quantitative meanings and senses formed by the lexical and grammatical (morphological) linguistic units of quantitative semantics. Cog-nitive and linguistic mechanisms of quantity interpretation as well as additional linguistic factors of quantitative sense formation receive consideration. Thus, the paper presents the findings concerning the specificity of each level in the process of quantity interpretation. Studying the processes of linguistic quantity interpretation in modern English, we employ the cognitive approach that allows assessing the role of a person in both, comprehension of the quantitative characteristics of the world and formation of the quantitative meanings and senses in the language sys-tem. To provide an account of the issues under study we address the theories worked out within the framework of cognitive linguistics by Russian and foreign scholars: cognitive semantics, conceptualiza-tion, representation and linguistic interpretation. Key words: conceptualization, interpretation, concept QUANTITY, basic properties, additional properties, cognitive mechanisms, linguistic mechanisms, linguistic factors.

View PDFchevron_right
On the Semantic Relation between Nominal and Quantity Expressions in Japanese
Daisuke Bekki

New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2012 Workshops, LENLS, JURISIN, MiMI, Miyazaki, Japan, November and December 2012, Revised Selected Papers), Yoichi Motomura, Alastair Butler, Daisuke Bekki (Eds.), LNAI 7856, pp.41-52, Springer, Heidelberg., 2013

comes here)

View PDFchevron_right
The semantics of adjectives of quantity
Stephanie Solt

2009

THE SEMANTICS OF ADJECTIVES OF QUANTITY by Stephanie Solt Advisor: Professor William McClure

View PDFchevron_right
Semantics of Nouns and Nominal Number
Heike Wiese

In the present paper, I will discuss the semantic structure of nouns and nominal number markers. In particular, I will discuss the question if it is possible to account for the syntactic and semantic formation of nominals in a parallel way, that is I will try to give a compositional account of nominal semantics. The framework that I will use is "twolevel semantics".

View PDFchevron_right
The Semantics of Nominals
M.Teresa Espinal

2016

This special volume prese of nominal expressions. It has long been clear between syntactic categor generalized quantifiers, w does little to advance our semantics of nominals tha years, this picture has grow sions that we would like to Since the early 1980s nominal expressions foun the same semantic type (s

View PDFchevron_right

Cited by

Variable Input and the Acquisition of Plural Morphology
Cristina Schmitt

Language Acquisition

The present article examines the effect of variable input on the acquisition of plural morphology in two varieties of Spanish: Chilean Spanish, where the plural marker is sometimes omitted due to a phonological process of syllable final /s/ lenition, and Mexican Spanish (of Mexico City), with no such lenition process. The goal of the study is to determine whether variable input for grammatical morphology affects the acquisition process. Does the ambiguous nature (sometimes present and sometimes absent) of a form affect acquisition? To address this question, Experiment 1 examines the production of the plural marker in Chilean-and Mexican Spanish-speaking children, and Experiments 2 and 3 examine children's use of plural and singular indefinite noun phrases in comprehension. The results indicate that variable input affects acquisition, with Chilean children taking longer to acquire the plural marker than Mexican children.

View PDFchevron_right
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
© 2025 Academia. All rights reserved