Ilona Spector: Hebrew floating quantifiers

This paper addresses the issue of Floating Quantifier phenomena in Hebrew, focusing on the case of the universal quantifier kol (‘all’) and proposes a new, non-derivational analysis in the LFG framework in which the floating and the non-floating quantifier constructions are treated separately. This is based on semantic evidence showing that the quantifiers in these constructions have non-identical semantic effects. Thus, there is no need to assume a derivational relation between the two constructions. I propose to analyze the Floating Quantifier construction in Hebrew as an instance of Topicalization, accompanied by Triggered Inversion. The incorporated pronoun on the floating quantifier is explained by the Extended Coherence Principle, when the pronoun is anaphorically bound by the topic. The pragmatic markedness of this construction naturally follows from this analysis, it being an instance of Topicalization. 1