Open AccessQuantificational readings of indefinites with focused creation verbs
Author(s) -
Tamina Stephenson
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.44.2006.322
Subject(s) - focus (optics) , sentence , contrast (vision) , linguistics , reading (process) , set (abstract data type) , extension (predicate logic) , computer science , interval (graph theory) , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , mathematics , philosophy , physics , combinatorics , programming language , optics
This paper looks at sentences with "quantificational indefinites," discussed by Diesing (1992) and others. I propose that these sentences generate sets of alternatives of the form {p, not p and it's possible that p}, which restrict the quantification by an extension of familiar focus principles. For example, in the sentence "I usually read a book about slugs" (on the relevant reading), "usually" quantifies over pairs such that x is a book about slugs, t is a time interval, and one alternative is true from the set {I read x at t, I can but do not read x at t}. In addition to accounting for a well-known contrast between creation and non-creation verbs, this also explains a second contrast that Diesing’s analysis cannot account for.