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The influence of tense in adverbial quantification

We argue that there is a crucial difference between determiner and adverbial
quantification. Following Herburger [2000] and von Fintel [1994],
we assume that determiner quantifiers quantify over individuals and adverbial
quantifiers over eventualities. While it is usually assumed that
the semantics of sentences with determiner quantifiers and those with
adverbial quantifiers basically come out the same, we will show by way
of new data that quantification over events is more restricted than quantification
over individuals. This is because eventualities in contrast to
individuals have to be located in time which is done using contextual information
according to a pragmatic resolution strategy. If the contextual
information and the tense information given in the respective sentence
contradict each other, the sentence is uninterpretable. We conclude that
this is the reason why in these cases adverbial quantification, i.e. quantification
over eventualities, is impossible whereas quantification over
individuals is fine.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:840
Date January 2004
CreatorsEndriss, Cornelia, Hinterwimmer, Stefan
PublisherUniversität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Extern. Extern
Source SetsPotsdam University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceInterdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 1
Rightshttp://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php

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