Research Talk

April 27, 16-17:30, Erasmusbuilding 14.11

David Ahn, UvA

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue for a treatment of adverbial quantifiers as quantifying over situations described by alternatives of their scope, where the description relation between situations and these alternatives is the tightly coupled relation of characterization from Episodic Logic and FOL** (Schubert and Hwang, 2000; Schubert, 2000). Because the conditions under which a negated sentence characterizes a situation are not simply the complement of the conditions for characterization by its positive counterpart, it is possible to extend the range of alternatives beyond focus-induced alternatives to include the classically exhaustive disjunction of a sentence and its negation. The phenomenon of presupposition incorporation in adverbial, but not nominal, quantifier domains can then be explained without recourse to intermediate accommodation. This analysis, coupled with some assumptions about the contingency relation associated with 'when', also yields a novel solution to the proportion problem.