Basic English Syntax with Exercises

measure noun

1.3.6 Functionally underspecified categories

The nouns in (190) do not function as the main semantic element of the expression as do those in (191). Note that the expressions in (191) refer to a picture, a disposal and a door respectively, but the referents of the expressions in (190) are wine, tea and tourists respectively. One can pour a bottle of wine and drink a cup of tea, but what is poured and drunk is not the bottle or the cup but the wine and the tea. On the other hand, if one breaks a picture of the president or deplores the disposal of the evidence, it is not the president that gets broken nor the evidence that is deplored. The kind of nouns in (190) are called measure or group nouns and they differ from other nouns in terms of their relationship to their complements. The complements of the nouns in (191) are arguments of those nouns and as such stand in a thematic relationship to them. In other words, these nouns are thematic elements which have Θ-grids in their lexical entries. Measure nouns do not stand in the same relationship to their complements at all and in fact they appear to have a similar relationship to their complements as quantifying determiners do to their nominal complements. This is not a thematic relationship and hence it appears that these nouns are not thematic nouns. Clearly they are not determiners either and hence they seem to be prime candidates to be analysed as non-thematic non-functional nouns.

1.3.6 Functionally underspecified categories

The complements of measure nouns are always prepositional, though specifically the preposition of is always involved. We are not yet in a position to clearly see the details of what this implies, so we will not pursue the issue at this point. The following lexical entries are an approximation of what is necessary to more precisely capture their true nature:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

These two constructions are interpreted in very similar ways. (72b) involves a measure or group noun, which we have argued are non-thematic nouns lacking a specification for the F feature. Semantically these work in a very uniform way: the complement of the group noun identifies a set of individuals (in this case the dancers) and the group noun focuses on a part of this set by dividing the set up into natural quantities (groups of individuals, bottles of wine, cups of tea, etc.). This is exactly how the structure with the pre-determiner is interpreted: the set is identified by the inner DP (the dancers) and this set is partitioned into natural quantities (individual dancers in this case) and the pre-determiner quantifies these.

4.3 Multiple Determiners

One possible way to account for this similarity is to assume that the empty noun in the pre-determiner structure works like a group or measure noun. Thus, if this can be maintained, there is semantic evidence for the presence of the empty noun. We can take this further by the following observation. Group nouns allow their DP complements to be fronted:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

As this phenomenon is restricted to structures involving group nouns, it seems that this is strong evidence in favour of the assumption that pre-determiner constructions involve a group noun in the position we have proposed an empty category.