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Floating quantifiers are autonomous phrases: A movement analysis

Paper · 2019 · Al Khalaf, Eman

Summary

The paper looks at quantifier float (Q-float), where a quantifier is split from the nominal it belongs to, as in The students all…. It uses Modern Standard Arabic data checked with native speakers. There are two standard accounts. Stranding says the nominal moves away from a constituent it shared with the quantifier. The adverbial account treats the quantifier as an adjunct. Al Khalaf argues that neither one fits the Arabic facts.

The data have two sides:

  • Arabic floating quantifiers sit in positions where displaced nominals leave lower copies, which points to movement.
  • In many cases the quantifier and its associate could never have been a single continuous constituent.

The proposal follows Ott's analysis of German split topics. The quantifier phrase and the associate are merged as a symmetric set of two independent phrases. Under Chomsky's (2013) labeling framework, such a set cannot be labeled until the associate moves out. This captures both the movement-like locality and the lack of a shared constituent. The result is that Arabic floating quantifiers work as a reliable diagnostic of where moved nominals originate.

Key points

  • Arabic allows a wide range of floaters:
    • universal quantifiers: kull, jamiiʕ, kaafah ('all') and kila ('both');
    • generalized quantifiers: baʕd ('some') and aħad ('one');
    • numerals, which the author says had not been documented as floating before.
  • Standard English floats only all, both and each; floated half or three is ungrammatical.
  • Arabic floating quantifiers appear in the following positions:
    • subject, direct object, double-accusative object and prepositional complement;
    • the complement of passives and unaccusatives, a position where other languages ban them.
  • The floated quantifier carries a pronominal clitic agreeing with the associate (e.g., kull-u=hum), and it matches the associate's case.
  • Sentence-final floating quantifiers, even after a transitive object, are explained by subjects being able to sit at either edge of vp. Possessor clitics inside construct-state nominals remain an open problem.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A floated quantifier stands in an argument–predicate relation to its associate and is not just an adverb, so the players, three of them were injured names a subset of a known set.
  • I2. The position of a floating quantifier reveals where the associated nominal started, for example the object slot of a passive or unaccusative verb.
  • I3. The agreement clitic on the floated quantifier is an explicit morphological link back to its associate, so the association can be resolved by feature matching instead of adjacency.
  • I4. The paper's minimal pairs, such as Children were three playing versus Three children were playing, mark exactly what a language forbids.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Model such phrases as a counted sub-collection of an existing entity, not a new entity, which helps track holdings and quantities in maths word problems.
  • I2 (frames): When assigning VerbNet roles, treat a floated all/both next to a passive participle as evidence that its associate is the underlying theme/patient.
  • I3 (tree): Add a post-parse rule that links a floated all/each/both to the nearest compatible nominal, so the link stays explainable even when the parser attaches the quantifier as an adverbial.
  • I4 (learn): Use starred minimal pairs as negative controls, checking that the tagger and parser do not quietly accept English numeral float as a normal reading.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of JordanAmman · Jordan7 works · 86 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Al Khalaf, Eman. 2019. Floating quantifiers are autonomous phrases: A movement analysis. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.848

@article{eman2019floating,
  title = {{Floating quantifiers are autonomous phrases: A movement analysis}},
  author = {Al Khalaf, Eman},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.848},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.848}
}

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  51. How to cite this article: Al Khalaf, Eman. 2019. Floating quantifiers are autonomous phrases: A movement analysis. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 89. 1–23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.848 ↗
  52. Submitted: 29 October 2018 find
  53. Published: 02 August 2019 find
  54. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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