Non-conservative construals with percentage quantifiers in Slavic
Keywords:
conservativity, proportional quantifier, percentage quantifier, word order, information structure, non-conservativityAbstract
The paper investigates non-conservative, as opposed to conservative, interpretations of sentences with percentage quantifiers corresponding to ‘fifty percent’ in Slavic. Based on the results of a questionnaire study in Slavic languages with (Bulgarian and Macedonian) and without definiteness marking (BCMS, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, and Slovenian), we make the novel observation that word order is a main and sometimes the only means to distinguish between conservative and non-conservative readings. We argue that for the non-conservative reading to arise the percentage quantifier has to appear in a low position, VP-internally, in order to be part of the predicate and to take the VP’s extension as its first argument.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Marcin Wągiel, Berit Gehrke
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.