Champollion, Lucas. 2014. "Every boy bought two sausages each: Distributivity and dependent numerals"
Presented at WCCFL 32 (32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics), USC, March 7 2014. To appear in Proceedings of WCCFL 32.


[Full paper on lingbuzz]


Abstract:  It has been reported that some English speakers accept sentences like "Every boy bought two sausages each" (Szabolcsi, 2010). Analogous sentences that involve distance-distributive elements in the scope of distributive universals are grammatical in languages like German, Japanese and Korean. This suggests that adnominal "each" (for the relevant speakers) and its crosslinguistic counterparts across languages require covariation with distributive universal quantifiers and other licensors, but that they are not themselves distributive operators, contrary to standard accounts. I analyze "two sausages each" as a dependent numeral, analogous to dependent indefinites (Farkas, 1997). My analysis is couched in terms of dynamic plural predicate logic with postsuppositions (Brasoveanu, 2013; Henderson, 2014), which I present in terms of a novel river metaphor.

Keywords:  adnominal each, distance-distributivity, dependent numerals, dependent indefinites, postsuppositions, dynamic plural logic