Champollion, Lucas. 2014. "Overt distributivity in algebraic event semantics"


[Full paper on lingbuzz]


Abstract:  Adnominal and adverbial distributive elements are known to differ across languages as to whether they can only distribute over individuals mentioned in the same sentence, or also over pragmatically salient occasions that have not been mentioned. Those that can also be used as distributive determiners, such as English each, never allow distribution over occasions (Zimmermann, 2002b). I explain this pattern, and the behavior of distance-distributivity more generally, in a surface-compositional theory that imports ideas formally relates the differences in overt distributive elements to those between distributivity operators posited by Link (1983) and Schwarzschild (1996). I achieve surface compositionality by formulating the theory in algebraic event semantics (Krifka, 1998). (This is one of two self-contained papers that can be read individually but that form a coherent whole. The title of the other paper is "Covert distributivity in algebraic event semantics.")

Keywords:  distance-distributivity, crosslinguistic semantics, algebraic semantics, adnominal each, adverbial each, quantifier float, covers

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