Generalized floating quantifiers.

Abstract

A syntactic and semantic treatment of Japanese floating quantifiers is provided from a perspective of unification based grammatical theories and model theoretic semantics. The inventory of floating quantifiers under consideration includes not only familiar cardinals but also other quantificational elements such as universals. Syntactically, floating quantifiers are taken to be adverbial endocentric modifiers for some V-projections. Scrambling phenomena involving multiple floating quantifiers will also be accounted for without employing movement rules of any sort. Floating quantifiers function as semantic (but not syntactic) determiners (seen in the Generalized Quantifier theory) which establish a proper relationship between two sets (corresponding to a common noun and a one-place predicate) one of which functions as a domain of quantification. In addition to presenting the specifics of the syntactic and semantic accounts for the phenomena in question, this thesis considers consequences of the proposed account and offers a new perspective on a universal theory of quantification. A typological classification of language is proposed which establishes the opposition between 'floating quantifier oriented' vs. 'determiner oriented' languages. From this perspective, a comparison between Japanese and English is carried out and some typological differences between the two are shown to follow from the envisaged opposition.