Abstract
Set within the Chomskyan tradition, this book provides a typology of French Quantifiers (Qs, i.e. scope-bearing elements), based on their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors.1 More specifically, the main issues are to investigate their nature(s), their meaning(s), as well as the dependency(ies) they enter into.
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- 1.
For the time being, I use the term ‘quantifier’ (Q) to refer to items that contribute to some quantity or amount meaning. It does not say anything about its syntactic structure (or category), which is developed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
- 2.
Originally Lewis 1975 bases the tripartite structure on adverbs of quantification.
- 3.
In that respect, Hungarian resembles Japanese (see Lipták 2001): the ki-item is the basis of the quantificational paradigm, (i):
(i)
a.
ki
‘who’
c.
minden-ki
‘everyone’
b.
vala-ki
‘someone’
d.
aki
‘whorel’
- 4.
Kayne 1975 identifies a second type of FQ constructions, with Q preceding the restriction, (i):
(i)
Elle a tous voulu les lire
She has all wanted them to-read
‘She wanted to read them all’
(Kayne 1975:4)
This type is discussed in Section 3.1.3, when referring to Doetjes’ analysis of FQ constructions, and can then be analysed as a pure case of FQ structure, (19).
- 5.
- 6.
Cardinals, null Dets with bare nouns in English, partitives are also referred to as indefinites in the literature. In this section, I am only concerned with those mentioned in the main text.
- 7.
Echo-questions must be distinguished from information-seeking questions in (22a). Echo-questions are confirmation, or repetition-seeking questions ‘or “any question said in immediate response to an utterance which is surprising, deserving repetition, or which was in part not heard, or thought not to have been heard correctly,” “[…] or a showing of politeness, or concern, or an expression of surprise or disbelief, or the like,”’ (Boeckx 1999:76). As such, echo-questions have a specific interpretation par excellence (Starke 2001). They have a particular prosody: they involve heavy stress of the wh in-situ (Mathieu 2002) or a ‘high + rising echo intonation’ (Boeckx 1999: 76, see also Mathieu 2002), which is, as I will develop below, crucially different from what information-seeking questions trigger.
- 8.
In standard normative ‘written’ French, wh-fronting is never an option: it is compulsory and wh in-situ is rejected. In spoken French however, both are used.
- 9.
This statement suggests a dichotomy between two ‘dialects' of French, i.e. between that of Chang 1997 (a.o) on the one hand and that of Starke 2001, Adli 2006, on the other hand. That there are indeed ‘two dialects' is not that clear: even if colloquial NSC French speakers can vary with respect to syntactic judgments (with both negative and scope islands), the variations are subtle and as such can be considered as one and a single dialect. As for SC French, the syntactic variations are less subtle and are clearly not homogenous (availability (or not) of wh in-situ with root infinitives, of modals etc), i.e. it should not be taken as a whole. My decision to split French into two dialects is not arbitrary, but relies on the stable observation that the in-situ strategy is or is not a root phenomenon for the authors discussed above. In Chapter 6, I suggest that the variations observed among speakers of different dialects is due to the way researchers tackle the phenomenon: in taking semantics and prosody into account or not.
- 10.
I characterize indefinites as variables bound by an Existential Operator (∃) (Heim 1982).
- 11.
- 12.
A reviewer points out that the arguments to leave chaque out of the discussion vanishes once English each is taken into account. Her remark lies on the fact that each floats, yet it does not take DP complements, each the student being ungrammatical. At first sight, this remark is relevant. Once we look in more details at the distribution of English each, things look more complex, yet. Puskás 2002 shows that each appears to have a mixed behavior, with a distribution varying from chaque to chacun: when each floats, its associate is a plural DP ((ib) vs (iib)). More importantly, when it does not float, of is inserted if the nominal is a DP plural ((ia) vs. (iia)):
(i) and (ii) are is reminiscent of the distinction between chacun of-DP and chaque N: chacun takes a plural DP as its restriction (iii), while chaque a singular noun phrase (iv). only chacun can float:
(iii)
a.
Chacun des architectes a reçu un prix.
each of-the architects has received a prize
b.
Les architectes ont chacun reçu un prix.
the architects have each received a prize
(Puskás 2002: 124 (65))
(iv)
a.
Chaque architecte a reçu un prix
each architect has received a prize
b. *
L'architecte a chaque reçu un prix.
the architect has each received a prize
(Puskás 2002: 123 (63))
These data suggest that each comes in two flavors: as a potential FQ (and as such takes the of-DP complement and corresponds to chacun), or as a determiner of the chaque-type (and as such, cannot float). Since English each is no more a counterexample to the arguments put forward above, leaving out chaque from the discussion is justified. For more details, see Puskás 2002.
- 13.
This statement can be shown with other languages: in (i), the negative meaning is not morphologically marked (from Marcel den Dikken (p.c)): the negative semantics of the sentences in (i) are not due to morphological ‘negative’ marks: in (ia), n’t is not necessary to convey the negative meaning of the sentence; (ib) means ‘I do not care at all’ and in the Dutch example in (ic) de ballen ‘the balls’ turns the positive sentence negative when inserted.
(i)
a.
I could(n’t) care less
what do I care?!
b.
Ik snap er de ballen van
(Dutch)
I understand there the balls of
‘I do not understand it at all’
- 14.
The term ‘external’ syntax is used to refer to syntactic operations at the level of the clause. ‘Internal’ syntax refers to operations occurring within a DP.
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Baunaz, L. (2011). Overview. In: The Grammar of French Quantification. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 83. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0621-7_1
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