Abstract
Comparative quantifiers, such as more than three books, cannot take scope over any quantifier in subject position if they occupy object position. This is clearly different from the behavior of other quantifiers (e.g., universal quantifiers). This paper argues that this scope puzzle is due to a more complex internal structure of comparative quantifiers than other quantifiers. In the decompositional approach that I pursue, comparative quantifiers are decomposed into two generalized quantifiers (i.e., in the case above, the comparative operator er than three and the DP many books). In this approach, obligatory narrow scope of comparative quantifiers in object position is a consequence of the interplay of the independently motivated principles of grammar that also constrain other quantifiers. On the basis of the scope puzzle, I specifically argue for two constraints on Scope Shifting Operations (SSOs) a locality condition on SSOs and Scope Economy, proposed by Fox (2000), which prohibits SSOs that have no effect on semantic interpretation. Thus, I argue that the apparently peculiar facts of comparative quantifiers are, in fact, additional evidence for the core properties of SSOs.
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* I have presented parts of this paper at the Ling-Lunch at MIT (November 2002), at NELS 33 at MIT (November 2002), and at a workshop at the 20th National Conference of the English Linguistic Society of Japan (November 2002). I would like to thank the audiences at these talks for their comments. I am very grateful to Danny Fox and Irene Heim for invaluable discussion and their suggestions. I would also like to thank Sigrid Beck, Noam Chomsky, Michael Glanzberg, Elena Guerzoni, Martin Hackl, Ken Hiraiwa, Sarah Hulsey, Sabine Iatridou, Christopher Kennedy, Winfried Lechner, Andrew Ira Nevins, Jon Nissenbaum, David Pesetsky, Norvin Richards, Uli Sauerland, Shogo Suzuki, and one anonymous reviewer for Natural Language Semantics for their helpful comments. I also want to thank the speakers who judged many complicated sentences. Special thanks to Pranav Anand for his detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper, which improved the paper in various respects. All remaining errors and inadequacies are my own.
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Takahashi, S. More than Two Quantifiers*. Nat Lang Seman 14, 57–101 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-005-4534-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-005-4534-9