Through the study of floating quantifiers in a variety of languages, I demonstrate that floating quantification is not a uniform phenomenon and outline a series of puzzles that force us to adopt a two-part analysis. I argue that certain floating quantifiers are related to their nominal associate by syntactic transformation (the stranding approach, Sportiche 1988; Miyagawa 1989) and that others ...

Since the Conservativity Universal (Barwise & Cooper 1981; Keenan Stavi 1986) has been proposed for natural language determiners, several apparent counterexamples have presented in literature. Some of these, such as English only Only students presented, argued to involve an adverbial structure, thus not violating Conservativity. In this paper, we focus on proportional quantifiers 70% Ko...

The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was (‘what’), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was (‘what’) is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was (‘what’), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was (‘what’) differs from canonical argument was (‘wh...

In this paper interpretation principles for simple and complex frame-adverbial expressions are presented. Central to these principles is a distinction between p h a s e s and p e r i o d s together with the t e m p o r a l h i e rarchy , where multiple scales of time and relations can be expressed. A system, CLOCKWISE, has been implemented which interprets Swedish temporal expressions according...

Abstract It. fa ‘ago’ represents a rare case of grammaticalization finite verbal form and typical example what we call ‘preadaptive change’. Its present categorical status, however, is an object dispute between the different approaches historical theoretical linguistics: on one hand considered adverbial, other postposition, becoming sort test explanatory power both approaches. After reconsidera...