Certain Verbs Are Syntactically Explicit Quantifiers

• Main Author: Anna Szabolcsi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Prairie Press 2010-12-01
• Series: The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1565

<p>Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (<em>begin</em>), modals (<em>can</em>), and intensional raising verbs (<em>threaten</em>) with quantificational subjects in Shupamem, Dutch, and English. It appears that aspectual raising verbs and at least modals may undergo the same kind of overt or covert scope-changing operations as nominal quantifiers; the case of intensional raising verbs is less clear. Scope interaction is thus shown to be a new potential diagnostic of object-linguistic quantification, and the similarity in the scope behavior of nominal and verbal quantifiers supports the grammatical plausibility of ontological symmetry, explored in Schlenker (2006).</p><p><strong>References</strong></p><p>Ben-Shalom, D. 1996. Semantic Trees. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA.<br /><br />Bittner, M. 1993. Case, Scope, and Binding. Dordrecht: Reidel.<br /><br />Cresswell, M. 1990. Entities and Indices. Dordrecht: Kluwer.<br /><br />Cresti, D. 1995. ‘Extraction and reconstruction’. Natural Language Semantics 3: 79–122.<br /><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01252885" target="_blank">http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01252885</a><br /><br />Curry, B. H. &amp; Feys, R. 1958. Combinatory Logic I. Dordrecht: North-Holland.<br /><br />Dowty, D. R. 1988. ‘Type raising, functional composition, and non-constituent conjunction’. In Richard T. Oehrle, Emmon W. 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