SANDRO ZUCCHI and MICHAEL WHITE TWIGS, SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL CONSTITUTION OF PREDICATES

is somehow to be related to properties of the predicates drink wine and drink a bottle of wine which, in event talk, may be stated as follows: an event of drinking wine may have a proper part which is also an event of drinking wine, but an event of drinking a bottle of wine cannot have a proper part which is an event of drinking a bottle of wine. In Krifka’s account, these properties are described by saying that the predicate drink a bottle of wine, unlike the predicate drink wine, is quantized.1 The fact that several accounts converge on the same idea may be taken as an indication of the fruitfulness of the idea in explaining the phenomena that are being investigated. Yet, as we will show, the claim that contrast (1)–(2) is related to the fact that the predicate drink a bottle of wine, unlike the predicate drink wine, is quantized runs into some problems concerning indefinite NPs like a sequence, a twig, a quantity of N, and some Ns. ? Parts of this paper were presented at the University of Milan and at the sixth meeting of SALT. We thank Paolo Casalegno, Greg Carlson, Gennaro Chierchia, Graham Katz, Manfred Krifka, Mats Rooth and two anonymous referees for comments. 1 The accounts proposed by Moltmann, Hinrichs and Krifka agree that contrast (1)– (2) is related to these properties, but differ on how the restriction of for-adverbs to nonquantized predicates is to be derived. Krifka simply assumes that such a restriction is a condition of applicability of for-adverbs, while Moltmann and Hinrichs derive it from their quantificational nature. In Dowty’s account, events play no part, but, as Moltmann shows, a reformulation of his account in a Davidsonian framework would have these properties as consequences.