Abstract
The French existential determiner quelque is examined in relation to the notion of equivalence. This notion, formalised as Equity in Jayez and Tovena (Evidentiality and determination. In: Grønn A (ed) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, pp 271–286, 2008) is the explicit characterisation of a widespread intuition concerning free choice and epistemic items, according to which members of a set are presented as equivalent with respect to some relevant criterion or dimension. Equivalence is a unifying notion that enables us to embrace the different aspects of the distribution of quelque and turn them into a coherent whole.The paper discusses the epistemic component of quelque and draws attention to its evidential property, which is exploited in accounting for the subtle interplay between the determiner and the types of nouns it combines with. It is then argued that the seeming positive polarity of quelque derives from the conventionalised effect of a processing interaction between its existential quantifier status and the epistemic implicature it conveys. By taking into account the pressure of processing mechanisms on the stabilisation of use, we are able to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that several epistemic determiners with unrelated morphology in different languages exhibit a converging behaviour with respect to negation. Finally, a closer look at diachronic data reveals that the anti-specificity of quelque is present already in the early stages of the life of the item.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Although our work on free choice and epistemic determiners has progressed since the time of the original from 2008 version of this paper, we cannot include here all the detailed changes and additions that would be relevant. So, we will focus on what is essential to the description of quelque.
- 2.
For the sake of clarity, in characterising the intuitively appealing notion of equivalence, we stick to the terminological choice adopted in previous work (Jayez and Tovena, 2008), where we have called Equity the combination of the two constraints discussed in this section. The definition of Equity is recalled in (29) below.
- 3.
If one thinks of situations as worlds, choices amount to complete answers to a constituent question, in the partition style of analysis by Groenendijk and Stokhof.
- 4.
The joint effect of these constraints always rules out the choices where no individual at all is ever chosen and where all individuals are chosen everywhere, but also a number of intermediary cases, depending on the cardinality of S and D. In the example in hand, ten more choices are eliminated and only the following four survive.
We remain neutral as to whether these choices are collected at some point into a single object, be it a conjunction or disjunction of alternatives.
- 5.
In addition to differences in the technical implementation of alternatives, the three mentioned proposals can be distinguished by the importance they assign to scales. Gawron grants a central role to them, in contrast to Zaefferer and Rawlins.
- 6.
Que is the direct object form of the relative pronoun in French. V-SUB is a predicative verb in the subjunctive, and e i notes a gap.
- 7.
Être is the equivalent of the be copula. α and α′ are sets of agreement features. Specifically, α includes number, gender and person (set to 3rd), α′ includes only number and person since French does not mark gender on a finite verb.
- 8.
If we want to relax the condition that each alternative uses exactly one individual, we can rephrase the definitions given in (13) in the following way: \(\{\langle w,G\rangle \vert G \subseteq \mathbb{G}\:\&\:\forall g \in G(g(x) \in \{ {a}_{1}\ldots {a}_{n}\}\:\&\:w,g\models \phi (x))\}\), where \(\mathbb{G}\) is the set of assignment functions and ϕ is the property of interest, i.e. λx. { coach}(x) or λx. { coach}(x) & { competent}(x). We don’t discuss here the choice between the two options on alternatives because it is mostly irrelevant to our concerns.
- 9.
It is of course possible to mention this property outside of the characterisation of alternatives, as in L’équipe gagnera le championnat quel que soit l’entraîneur, pourvu qu’il soit compétent (‘The team will win the championship whoever the coach is, provided he is competent’).
- 10.
UCC is the term used by Gawron for unconditionals. As mentioned in footnote 5, Gawron, like Zaefferer and Rawlins, uses alternatives, but his alternatives are ordered rather than flat ones.
- 11.
- 12.
This section draws on Jayez and Tovena (2008).
- 13.
We call a modal operator ‘complex’ when it is a stack of elementary modal operators, as when one uses \( Bel_aK_bBel_a[\phi] \) to code ‘a believes that b knows that a believes that φ’.
- 14.
We follow Aikhenvald (2005) in assuming that evidentiality is about the linguistic marking of the source of information, not of its validity or reliability.
- 15.
The relation of evidentiality to modality is a well-known open issue. We do not base evidentiality on modal status.
- 16.
This section draws on Jayez and Tovena (2008).
- 17.
- 18.
The crosslinguistic set of items with this type of behaviour is broader. For instance, Spanish algo (‘something’), akin to algún, has a very similar distribution. See Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito (2003) for the epistemic character of algún.
- 19.
French has also pronominal forms such as je ne sais qui / quoi / où / quand / comment / pourquoi / PPinterrog , ‘I don’t know who / what / where / when / how / why’, which have the same distribution as the determiner.
- 20.
For negative quantifiers, we ignore the orthogonal issue of negative concord in French, see Corblin and Tovena (2001, 2010) and de Swart (2010) on this question.
Leaving negative concord considerations aside, notice that sentence (49a) is marginal. If accepted, it belongs to a colloquial register and has only a double negation reading. On the contrary, (49b) is acceptable and belongs to standard French, and only has a double negation reading. As an aside, recall that ne in the subordinate clause in (49b) does not contribute negation in everyday’s French.
- 21.
The situation does not seem to be entirely parallel for quel qu’il soit, that we leave aside.
- 22.
Access to Frantext can be obtained through a subscription procedure, see http://www.frantext.fr/. The original texts of the BFM http://bfm.ens-lyon.fr/ are available only to the members of the Elico project, see http://elico.linguist.jussieu.fr/.
- 23.
The examples of this section include (a) the text, as found in the BFM or in Frantext, (b) the name of the author or of the work—if the author is unknown, (c) the date provided by the BFM or by Frantext, (d) an approximate translation in modern French, (e) an approximate English translation.
- 24.
The ‘//’ sign marks the end of a verse.
- 25.
Christiane Marchello Nizia (p.c.) has drawn our attention to the fact that the verb of the subordinate clause is not necessarily in the subjunctive form, pace Buridant.
- 26.
Whether the concessive interpretation was grammaticalised or felt as an implicature in Old French and subsequent stages is an open question.
- 27.
This is the interpretation of (69), where the verb passoent ‘went through’ has imperfective morphology.
References
Aikhenvald, A. 2005. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alonso-Ovalle, L., and P. Menéndez-Benito. 2003. Some epistemic indefinites. North-Eastern Linguistic Society 33: 1–12.
Baker, C.L. 1970. Double negatives. Linguistic Inquiry 1: 169–186.
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., and M. Schlesewsky. 2009. Processing syntax and morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buridant, C. 2000. Grammaire Nouvelle de l’Ancien Français. Paris: Sedes.
Campbell, K. 1990. Abstract particulars. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Combettes, B. 2004. La grammaticalisation d’un déterminant indéfini: Quelque en Moyen Français. Scolia 18: 9–40.
Corblin, F. 2004. Quelque. In The handbook of French semantics, ed. F. Corblin and H. de Swart, 99–107. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Corblin, F., and L. Tovena. 2001. On the multiple expression of negation in Romance. In Romance languages and linguistic theory 1999, ed. Y. D’Hulst, J. Rooryck, and J. Schroten, 87–115. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Corblin, F., and L. Tovena. 2010. Negation in the simple clause in the Romance languages. In Fundamental issues in the Romance languages, ed. D. Godard, 263–318. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Culioli, A. 1982. A propos de quelque. In Actes du Colloque franco-bulgare de linguistique. Contrastive Linguistics, 49–58. Reprinted in Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation T.3, ed. A. Culioli, Paris: Ophrys, 1999.
Dayal, V. 2005. The universal force of free choice any. In Linguistic variation yearbook, 5–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
de Swart, H. 2010. Expression and interpretation of negation. Berlin: Springer.
Drenhaus, H., D. Saddy, and S. Frisch. 2005. Processing negative polarity items: When negation comes through the backdoor. In Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives, ed. S. Kepser and M. Reis, 145–165. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Farkas, D. 2002. Varieties of indefinites. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory XII, 59–83. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Fauconnier, G. 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6: 353–375.
Foulet, L. 1919. Quelque. Romania 45: 220–249.
Gawron, J.M. 2001. Universal concessive conditionals and alternative NPs in English. In Logical perspectives on language and information, ed. C. Condoravdi and G. Renardel de Lavalette, 73–105. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Giannakidou, A. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Giannakidou, A. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and philosophy 24: 659–735.
Horn, L.R. 1972. On the semantic property of logical operators in English. Published by Indiana University Linguistics Club, University of California Los Angeles.
Horn, L.R. 1989. The natural history of negation. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Horn, L.R. 2001. Any and (-)ever: Free choice and free relatives. In Proceedings of the 15th annual conference of the Israeli association for theoretical linguistics, 71–111. New York: Plenum Press.
Israel, M. 2001. Minimizers, maximizers and the rhetoric of scalar reasoning. Journal of Semantics 18: 297–331.
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2002. Determiners and (un)certainty. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory XII, 164–183. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2005. Free–choiceness and non individuation. Linguistics and Philosophy 28: 1–71
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2006. Epistemic determiners. Journal of Semantics 23: 217–250.
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2008. Evidentiality and determination. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, ed. A. Grønn, 271–286. Oslo: ILOS.
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2010a. Description et évolution de quelque. In Déterminants en diachronie et synchronie, ed. L.M. Tovena, 104–124. Paris: Projet ELICO Publications. http://elico.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr/livre-elico.html
Jayez, J., and L.M. Tovena. 2010b. Quatre problèmes pour le choix libre. Langue française Oslo: ILOS, 166: 51–72.
König, E. 1986. Conditionals, concessive conditionals and concessives: Areas of contrast, overlap and neutralization. In On conditionals, ed. C. Traugott, 229–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kratzer, A. 2005. Indefinites and the operators they depend on. In Reference and quantification. The Partee effect, ed. G.C. Carlson and F.J. Pelletier, 113–142. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Lee, Y.-S., and L. Horn (1994). Any as indefinite plus even. Ms. Yale University.
Maurin, A.-S. 2002. If tropes. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Moltmann, F. 2007. Events, tropes, and truthmaking. Philosophical Studies 134: 363–403.
Potts, C. 2005. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Quer, J. 1998. Mood at the interface. Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht.
Rawlins, K. 2008. (Un)conditionals: An investigation in the syntax and semantics of conditional structures. Ph.D. thesis, University of California Santa Cruz.
Sauerland, U. 2008. Implicated presuppositions. In The discourse potential of underspecified structures, ed. A. Steube, 581–599. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Shan, C. 2004. Delimited continuations in natural language. Quantification and polarity sensitivity. In Proceedings of the 4th continuations workshop, ed. H. Thielecke, 55–64. Technical report CSR-04-I, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham.
Spector, B. 2007. Aspects of the pragmatics of plural morphology: On higher-order implicatures. In Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, ed. U. Sauerland and P. Stateva, 243–281. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Szabolcsi, A. 2004. Positive polarity – negative polarity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22: 409–452.
Tredinnick, V.A. 2005. On the semantics of free relatives with -ever. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Van de Velde, D. 2000. Les indéfinis comme adjectifs. In De l’indétermination à la qualification. Les indéfinis, ed. L. Bosveld, M. Van Peteghem, and D. Van de Velde, 203–272. Arras: Artois Presses Université.
Vasishth, S., and R. Lewis. 2006. Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects. Language 82: 767–779.
Vasishth, S., S. Brüssow, R. Lewis, and H. Drenhaus 2008. Processing polarity: How the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical. Cognitive Science 32: 685–712.
von Fintel, K. 2000. Whatever. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory X, 27–39. Ithaca: CLC Publications
Williams, D.C. 1953. On the elements of being. Review of Metaphysics 7: 3–18.
Zaefferer, D. 1991. Conditionals and unconditionals: Cross-linguistic and logical aspects. In Semantic Universals and Universal Semantics, ed. D. Zaefferer, 210–236. Amsterdam: Foris Publications.
Zwarts, F. 1995. Nonveridical contexts. Linguistic Analysis 25: 286–312.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (grant Elico ANR-06-CORP-028-01)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jayez, J., Tovena, L.M. (2013). Scenarios of Equivalence: The Case of Quelque . In: Ebert, C., Hinterwimmer, S. (eds) Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5310-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5310-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5309-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5310-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)