Abstract for Justin Fitzpatrick's talk

Semantic and syntactic routes to floating quantification
Justin Fitzpatrick (MIT)
February 28, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

The proper analysis of floating quantification has been controversial for many years. I will present evidence that floating quantifiers (FQs) take two forms: some are adverbial elements that are not transformationally related to their associated NP/DP (e.g, English 'all'), while others are adnominal elements that are stranded by movement (e.g., Japanese numeral quantifiers). My analysis of these two types explains the surprising discovery that adnominal FQs can be stranded only through A-bar movement, while adverbial FQs are related only to A-moved phrases. These two types of FQs also show differing semantic properties. A-related adverbial FQs have "exhaustive" semantics, while A-bar related adnominal FQs are "non-exhaustive". This three-way link between adverbial FQs, A-movement, and exhaustivity on the one hand and stranded adnominals, A-bar movement, and non-exhaustivity on the other, brings up several architectural issues, including the relationship between A- and A-bar movement in a derivation and the interplay between semantics and syntax.