On quantified DPs in Baule (original) (raw)
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Person-marked quantifiers in Kinyarwanda
Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective
Person agreement is usually restricted to verbal categories. However, Bantu languages permit person agreement on certain adnominal quantifiers. We propose an account of the evolution of person agreement that constrains the cliticization of pronominals to specifier-head relationships. This diachronic view captures the presence of person agreement in Bantu on adnominal quantifiers as well as verbs. 1 Introduction Cross-linguistically, syntactic domains of agreement differ with respect to the kinds of agreement features they can show. Nominal-internal agreement rarely involves person, but often involves number, gender, and case features (Greenberg 1978, Lehmann 1988). Agreement on predicates, on the other hand, can involve number, gender, and-crucially distinct from nominal-internal agreement-person. French is illustrative of this point; it exhibits only gender and number features on adjectives, but the person feature is reserved for verbs, as illustrated in (1), where the verb sommes 'are.1pl' agrees in person (first) and number (plural) features with the trigger nous 'we.' The adjective pauvres 'poor' agrees in number (plural). 1 (1) Nous we sommes are.1pl pauvre-s. poor-pl 'We are poor.' French also shows number and gender features inside the nominal, as in (2). Here, similar to what was seen in (1), the adjective agrees in number (plural) with nous.
Hidden Trilogies of Universal Quantifiers: A syntactically based analysis of arabickulland its kins
Studia Linguistica, 2020
Distinct senses of universal quantification are expressed not only by vocabulary inventory variation, but also through features and categories which build the various quantifier types. It can be shown that the most productive Arabic universal kull (and arguably its kins in Semitic and other languages) conveys three universal quantifier senses, roughly equivalent to English all, every, and each (and not only just two, as commonly assumed). Similar trilogies are observed in Greek, French, or Hebrew (with two Q words, or just one). Thanks to their feature and category specifications, universal subtypes are more appropriately characterized in terms of Merge and Move syntactic operations, as in
A Minimalist Approach to the Analysis of the Structure of the KɨbhwanɈi Determiner Phrase
JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION, 2022
While the postulation that a noun phrase is headed by a determiner is a widely accepted approach to the analysis of languages across the world, linguists struggle to ascertain the exact elements which stand as functional categories. This is because languages (especially those in the Bantu family) display individual idiosyncrasies in this area of enquiry. This paper, therefore, examines the Structure of the Determiner Phrase in Kɨbhwanɉi using the Minimalist Approach. Specifically, the paper sought to establish the functional categories that head the DP and to examine the order of modifiers in the Kɨbhwanɉi DP. Data were obtained from Makete District in Njombe Region, Tanzania. They were collected through acceptability judgement, document review and focus group discussion (FGD). The findings of the study show that the functional categories that head the DP in Kɨbhwanɉi are: augments, the prenominal possessive formative-nya, and prenominal demonstratives. An augment and the formative-nya occur pre-nominally with their nouns where they function as determiners. The prenominal demonstrative is raised from its original (base generated) position below D. It has also been found that modifiers may range from one to six. This yields the order (DEM)/(AUG)/(DISTR)/(POSS) > N > POSS > QUANT > DEM > NUM > ADJ > REL. The order of these modifiers is not rigid. For the purpose of encoding emphasis or focus, the order may change, thus making the order neutral.
The morphosyntax of complement-head sequences: Clause structure and word order patterns in Kwa
2004
This chapter investigates the Gungbe nominal system. Based on the head-initial hypothesis, it proposes an analysis of the Gungbe D-system, where the specificity marker encodes D° and the number marker realizes Num°. Under the split-D hypothesis, it is suggested that these two functional heads project within the D-system as the nominal left periphery. Like certain Gungbe left peripheral markers, the specificity and number markers occur to the right edge because they force movement on their complement to their specifier positions.
It is commonly assumed that distance distributive elements like binominal each are operators that may or may not be related to other instances of the word each (e.g., floated each). We propose instead that binominal each is a bound variable in the Skolem term denoted by the indefinite noun phrase that each appears adjacent to. We argue that this approach captures various generalizations about the distribution of distance distributive elements within and across languages, and in particular it unifies distance distributivity with dependent indefinites as instances of the more general idea that languages sometimes morphologically mark 'dependent quantification.'
D-quantification: A Japanese Variation
LSA annual meeting extended abstracts, 2014
I. Introduction. Determiner quantifiers like every and most are assumed to take common noun phrases of type <e,t> to derive a generalized quantifier of type <<e,t>,t>, as in (1). Matthewson 2001 subjects this standard assumption to crosslinguistic scrutiny, and based on St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish), she proposes a two-step approach to create a QP; the first is the creation of a DP of type and the second involves quantification over parts of the plural individual denoted by the DP, as illustrated in (2). (1) QP<<e,t>,t> (2) QP<<e,t>,t> D<<e,t>,<<e,t>,t>> NP<e,t> Q<e,<<e,t>,t>> DP every linguist tákem 'all' D NP <e,t> i…a 'the' smelhmúlhats 'women' This paper discusses Japanese, which lacks D and has nouns of type (cf. Chierchia 1998, Mizuguchi 2004). Japanese allows 'double quantification', which, I argue, is best explained if Japanese nouns remain of type throughout the derivation.
Quantitifcation in English is Inherently Sortal
1999
Within Linguistics the semantic analysis of natural languages (English, Swahili,...) has drawn extensively on semantical concepts first formulated and studied within classical logic, principally first order logic. Nowhere has this contribution been more substantive than in the domain of quantification and variable binding. As studies of these notions in natural language have developed they have taken on a life of their own, resulting in refinements and generalizations of the classical quantifiers as well as the discovery of new types of quantification which exceed the expressive capacity of the classical quantifiers. We refer the reader to Keenan & Westerståhl (1997) for an overview of results in this area. Here we focus on one property quantification in natural language-its inherently sortal nature-which distinguishes it from quantification in logic. §1 From Logic to Linguistic Analysis Within Linguistics a primary goal of semantics is to formulate a compositional semantic interpretation for the expressions of a given natural language. This of course presupposes a grammar which defines the set of expressions pretheoretically judged grammatical by native speakers. At time of writing grammars for English that have been proposed are incomplete-they fail to generate some expressions which speakers judge grammatical, and unsound-they generate some expressions not judged grammatical by native speakers. Nonetheless our understanding of the syntax of certain simple fragments of English is clear enough that it makes sense to ask for a compositional semantics for those fragments. We focus here on issues concerning the semantic analysis of quantificational structures in natural language. Classical Logic (CL) provides semantic representations like (1b) and (2b) for the English sentences (Ss) in (1a) and (2a) respectively. (1) a. All poets daydream b. ∀x(Poet(x) → Daydream(x)) (2) a. Some poets daydream b. ∃x(Poet(x) & Daydream(x)) Ignoring the semantic properties associated with tense (present, past, ...) and aspect (generic, perfective, ...), this semantic analysis is correct in the sense that systematic use of such representations correctly captures certain judgements of semantic relatedness given by native speakers. E.g. an English sentence P is understood to entail a sentence Q iff their semantic representations P' and Q' are such that Q' is interpreted as True in all models in which P' is. Moreover this semantic analysis enables linguists to represent a variety of semantic distinctions which are difficult to understand and represent in the absence of a systematic representation of quantification. Here are three cases: First, English Ss like (3) are semantically ambiguous; they can be understood in two logically distinct ways, as represented in (3a) and (3b), using some obvious abbreviations. (3) Each student in the class read some play over the vacation a. ∀x(Sx → ∃y(Py & xRy)) b. ∃y(Py & ∀x(Sx → xRy))
DP Positions in African Languages
2010
Abstract: A central concern of syntactic theory has long been to explain and predict the distribution of nominal expressions, henceforth D (eterminer) P (hrases), and their involvement in morphosyntactic relations. Where can they occur? When can they move, ...