Basic English Syntax with Exercises

quantifier

1.3.5.2 Determiners

A related concept to number is quantity and determiners often act as quantifiers for the nouns they introduce:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

Not all quantificational elements are determiners, however. Some quantifiers might at first appear to be determiners, but the observation that they are not in complementary distribution with determiners challenges this assumption:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

Traditionally this group of quantifiers are known as post-determiners as they always follow other determiners (which are sometimes called central determiners). This terminology gives the impression that post-determiners are a subclass of determiner, which is likely to be inaccurate. These elements often have many adjectival qualities, including being able to be modified by degree adverbs and having comparative and superlative forms:

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.

4.2.3 Adjunction within the DP

There are some cases of modification by an adverb, however, that do seem to behave as though the adverb is part of the DP. This mainly takes place with quantificational determiners, the meaning of which is modified by the adverb:

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.

5.4.2 PP modifiers

In (178a) and (b) the object has undergone a movement to the front of the clause, out of its Case position. But if this is an allowable movement, why should it not be allowed to move to the back of the clause? In (178c) the object has moved backwards behind the PP adjunct with ink. In this case, the DP is very long and complex involving quantification and post head modification. A simpler DP would not be allowed to do the same thing:

7.3.2 Wh-movement

If the wh-element is moved to the specifier of CP then the result is a wh-interrogative interpretation. If not then the sentence is interpreted as an echo question. We might think of this in terms of the interpretation of the wh-element itself. A wh-element interpreted in an echo question simply has the role of a pointer to the missing information. In a sense it is a ‘place filler’ that does little more than indicate what needs to be repeated. A wh-element that is moved into a the specifier of the CP is a little more complex in terms of its interpretation. The semantics of a moved wh-element is similar to that of a quantifier such as everyone or someone. These are called operators as they indicate a process that is needed to work out the meaning of the sentence that contains them. For example, consider the difference between the following:

7.3.2 Wh-movement

The truth of (33) is fairly easy to establish. First we find the individual that the name Tim refers to and then we see if they have the property of being tall. The truth of the second statement is not quite so easy. For a start, there is no individual to whom the word someone refers and so it isn’t just a matter of checking to see if the person has the property of being tall. Instead we must go to the set of things that someone could potentially refer to (the set of people relevant to a conversation, perhaps) and go through each of them individually to see if they are tall. If at least one of them is tall, then the sentence in (33) is true. If none of them are tall then the sentence is false. Consider what who means in (32a). Like the quantifier someone the interrogative pronoun does not refer to a known individual. Instead, the hearer is asked to perform a process of going to the set of potential referents and finding those that if substituted for the wh-element would produce a true sentence:

7.6 Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced the final part of the clause structure of the English sentence. This part of the structure, built on top of the IP serves a number of purposes, but collectively seems to be to do with the syntactic arrangement of operators of one type or another. With wh-movement, both in interrogative clauses and relative clauses, the wh-element is an operator with either quantifier-like or anaphoric function. The interpretation of this element is dependent on movement which has a dual role, both to mark the clause as having a special interpretation (as an interrogative or relative) and to establish a relationship between that interpretation and a position in the clause itself. Hence, questions can be seen to be ‘about’ the subject or the clause, etc. and relatives can relate the modified noun to the object of the clause, etc. Focus and negative fronting may also have a similar function in that their interpretation is quantifier-like. Topicalisation, although not quantificational, may be seen as anaphoric in that the topic refers to some element established in the discourse.