54 found
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  1. Genericity: An Introduction.Manfred Krifka, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Gregory Carlson, Alice ter Meulen, Gennaro Chierchia & Godehard Link - 1995 - In Greg N. Carlson & Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds.), The Generic Book. University of Chicago Press. pp. 1--124.
     
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  2. Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics.Manfred Krifka - 1989 - In Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem & P. van Emde Boas (eds.), Semantics and contextual expression. Providence RI, U.S.A.: Foris Publications. pp. 75--115.
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  3. The origins of telicity.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...)
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  4. Quantifying into Question Acts.Manfred Krifka - 2001 - Natural Language Semantics 9 (1):1-40.
    Quantified NPs in questions may lead to an interpretation in which the NP quantifies into the question. Which dish did every guest bring? can be understood as: 'For every guest x: which dish did x bring?'. After a review of previous approaches that tried to capture this quantification formally or to explain it away, it is argued that such readings involve quantification into speech acts. As the algebra of speech acts is more limited than a Boolean algebra – it only (...)
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  5.  89
    At least some determiners aren't determiners.Manfred Krifka - 1999 - In Ken Turner (ed.), The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view. New York: Elsevier. pp. 1--257.
  6.  59
    Additive Particles under Stress.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    It is customary to identify three broad classes of grading particles: additive particles like also, exclusive particles like only, and scalar particles like even (cf. König (1991); in the examples, grave accent stands for the main, falling accent).
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  7.  93
    Four Thousand Ships Passed through the Lock: Object-Induced Measure Functions on Events.Manfred Krifka - 1990 - Linguistics and Philosophy 13 (5):487 - 520.
  8.  56
    Pragmatic Strengthening in Plural Predications and Donkey Sentences.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    The classical analysis of donkey sentences like (1.a,b) in Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982) assigns them truth conditions as given in (2.a). That is, they are treated as quantifications over farmer-donkey pairs. Partee (1984) and Kadmon (1987) have pointed out that the proper reading of (1.b), and a preferred reading of (1.a), is rather a quantification over farmers, as illustrated in (2.b).
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  9. Basic notions of information structure.Manfred Krifka - 2008
    This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS following Chafe (1976) within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. It then defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and (...)
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  10.  51
    Response particles as propositional anaphors.Manfred Krifka - 2013 - Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23:1-18..
    The paper explains response particles like yes and no as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences. It is argued that negated antecedent clauses introduce two propositional discourse referents, which results in ambiguities of answers that are partly resolved by pragmatic optimization. The paper also discusses response particles like okay, right, uh-huh, uh-uh, and German ja, nein and doch.
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  11.  56
    Be brief and vague! And how bidirectional optimality theory allows for verbosity and precision.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    Given the beginnings of the United States of America, its sympathy with the French revolution and its rationalist attitude towards the institutions of society, one would have expected that it would have been one of the first nations to adopt the new metric system that was introduced in France in 1800. But the history of the attempts to do so is decidedly mixed. American Congress authorized the use of the metric system in 1866. In 1959, American measurements were defined in (...)
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  12. For a Structured Meaning Account of Questions and Answers.Manfred Krifka - 2001 - In Audiatur Vox Sapientia. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow. Academie Verlag. pp. 287-320.
    In the logical, philosophical and linguistic literature, a number of theoretical frameworks have been proposed for the meaning of questions (see Ginzburg (1995), Groenendijk & Stokhof (1997) for recent overviews). I will concentrate on two general approaches that figured prominently in linguistic semantics, which I will call the proposition set approach and the structured meaning approach (sometimes called the “propositional” and the “categorial” or “functional” approach). I will show that the proposition set approach runs into three problems: It does not (...)
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  13. Varieties of semantic evidence.Manfred Krifka - 2019 - In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: foundations, history and methods. Boston: De Gruyter.
    Meanings are the most elusive objects of linguistic research. The article summarizes the type of evidence we have for them: various types of metalinguistic activities like paraphrasing and translating, the ability to name entities and judge sentences true or false, as well as various behavioral and physiological measures such as reaction time studies, eye tracking.
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  14. Parametrized sum individuals for plural anaphora.Manfred Krifka - 1996 - Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (6):555 - 598.
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  15.  88
    Bare NPs: Kind-referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither?Manfred Krifka - 2003 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 13:180.
    It is generally assumed that there are two types of genericity, called characterizing statements and kind reference in Krifka et al. (1995). Characterizing statements express generalizations about sets of entities or situations, cf. (1); kind reference involves reference to an entity that is related to specimens, cf. (2).
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  16.  45
    Modelling Questions in Commitment Spaces.Manfred Krifka - 2021 - In Moritz Cordes (ed.), Asking and Answering: Rivalling Approaches to Interrogative Methods. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. pp. 63–95.
    The paper outlines the analysis of certain question types in the Commitment Space framework, as presented in Krifka (2015). The two basic ideas are: Assertions and most questions involve commitments of speaker and addressee to the truth of a proposition, and questions consist in restricting the continuation of the conversation to answers to the question. The main focus is on breadth, not depth and the detailed comparison with alternative approaches, and on semantic modelling, not on the syntactic and prosodic realizations. (...)
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  17.  86
    Alternatives for aspectual particles: Semantics of still and already.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    Aspectual particles (the term is due to (König 1991)) appear to come in groups, related by negation, and therefore have attracted the attention of formal semanticists. The following examples list the particles of English, German and Hebrew; they show that the system is semantically transparent in various degrees.
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  18.  87
    Definitional Generics.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    This article1 investigates a particular use of generic sentences (or “characterizing” sentences, in the terminology of Krifka e.a. 1995), which is most prevalent with indefinite singular subjects. Such subjects cannot always be interchanged with bare plural NPs, as has been famously pointed out by Lawler (1973).
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  19. (1 other version)Questions.Manfred Krifka - 2011 - In von Heusinger, Maienborn & Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 2. de Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1742–1785.
     
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  20.  50
    Non-novel Indefinites in Adverbial Quantification.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    This influence of accent has been taken as evidence that adverbial quantification is focus sensitive (cf. Rooth (1985)) or presupposition sensitive (cf. von Fintel (1994), Rooth (1995)). I will discuss a problem that has been identified by von Fintel and Rooth, the requantifiation problem. Roughly stated, standard accounts of indefinites as NPs that introduce new discourse referents are at odds with standard accounts of the focus sensitivity or presupposition sensitivity of (1), which force us to assume that indefinites may pick (...)
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  21.  85
    Genericity.Manfred Krifka & Claudia Gerstner-Link - 1993 - In Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds.), Syntax - An international handbook of contemporary research. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 966-978.
  22.  71
    Superlative quantifiers and meta-speech acts.Ariel Cohen & Manfred Krifka - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (1):41-90.
    Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don’t promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech (...)
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  23.  66
    Negated antonyms: Creating and filling the gap.Manfred Krifka - 2007 - In Uli Sauerland & Penka Stateva (eds.), Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 163--177.
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  24.  52
    Some remarks on polarity items.Manfred Krifka - 1991 - In Dietmar Zaefferer (ed.), Semantic universals and universal semantics. New York: Foris Publications. pp. 150--189.
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  25. Embedding Speech Acts.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    Speech acts have sometimes been considered as unembeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that speech acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. In particular, I consider denegation and conjunction of speech acts, quantification into speech acts, conditionalization of speech acts, the embedding of speech acts by verbs like say and wonder, speechact-modifying adverbials like frankly, clauses commenting on speech acts, like certain uses of because-clauses, parentheticals, and appositive relative clauses. A crucial distinction is made between speech acts (...)
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  26.  57
    Scope Inversion under the Rise-Fall Contour in German.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    This article1 deals with a well-known but still ill-explained fact about German, namely scope inversion under a particular accent contour, as illustrated with the following examples, where “/” and “\” stand for rising and falling accent: (a) Mindestens ein Stu- dent hat jeden Roman gelesen, lit. ‘at least one student has every novel read’, with the reading “For at least one student x: x read every book”, and (b) Mindestens /EIN Student hat \JEDen Roman gelesen, with the additional reading “For (...)
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  27. Superlative Quantifiers as Modifiers of Meta-Speech Acts.Ariel Cohen & Manfred Krifka - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:11.
    The superlative quantifiers, at least and at most, are commonly assumed to have the same truth-conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. However, as Geurts & Nouwen have demonstrated, this is wrong, and several theories have been proposed to account for them. In this paper we propose that superlative quantifiers are illocutionary operators; specifically, they modify meta-speech acts.Meta speech-acts are operators that do not express a speech act, but a willingness to make or refrain from making a (...)
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  28. Introduction.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    The idea that various subsystems of the linguistic faculty interact with and through information structure has an ever growing influence on linguistic theory formation. While this development is very promising, it also involves the risk that fundamental notions are understood in a different way in different subfields, so that congruent results may only be apparent or cross-discipline generalizations may be overlooked – dangers that are very real, as notorious examples from the past have shown. The present volume is an attempt (...)
     
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  29. Manner in dative alternation.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    There are a number of well-known restrictions for the Dative Alternation (cf. Green (1974), Oehrle (1976), Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, & Goldberg (1989), Pinker (1989), Pesetsky (1992), Levin (1993). I will show that several of the low-level semantic restrictions are consequences of a more general one involving the incorporation of a manner component into the meaning of the verb. These restrictions can be explained by assuming two distinct representations of verbs participating in the Dative Alternation: The PO frame expresses movement of (...)
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  30. The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers.Manfred Krifka - 2004 - In Topic and Focus: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 139-151.
    In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus (...)
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  31.  58
    Semantic and Pragmatic Conditions for the Dative Alternation.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    One of the difficult areas for persons learning a foreign language is to grasp the range of usages of syntactic patterns that exist in the foreign language. It is not sufficient to learn how passive formation works, or how pre- or postpositional phrases are constructed, or how perfect tenses are expressed. One also has to learn which verbs can passivize at all, which verbs go with which pre- or postpositions, and, in case perfect tenses are expressed, as in a number (...)
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  32. How to interpret “expletive” negation under bevor in German.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    (2) Peter wollte Potsdam nicht verlassen bevor das Projekt in ruhigem Fahrwasser war. There are other well-known examples of non-interpreted negation, viz. cases of so-called negative concord in Slavic and Romance languages, but also in dialects of German and English. But arguably, in those cases the “superfluous” negation has to be present for grammatical reasons, which is not the case here. I will show that the negation is in fact interpreted, and that, due to a complex interplay of semantic and (...)
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  33. Information structure. Notional distinctions, ways of expression.Manfred Krifka & Caroline Féry - manuscript
    to be published in the Proceedings of the 18. International Conference of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.
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  34.  22
    Performative updates and the modeling of speech acts.Manfred Krifka - 2024 - Synthese 203 (1):1-31.
    This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like _the meeting is (hereby) (...)
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  35.  94
    A note on an asymmetry in the hedonic implicatures of olfactory and gustatory terms.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    The ways in which languages express primary sense qualities have been investigated quite unevenly, which is due to the fact that there are great differences in how the senses are linguistically represented, which in turn reflects differences in these sense qualities themselves and their role in cognition.
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  36.  81
    Functional similarities between bimanual coordination and topic/comment structure.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    While language is presumably unique to humans, there are possible pre-linguistic features that developed in the course of human evolution which predate features of language, and might have even been essential for its evolution. A number of such possible preadaptations for human language have been discussed, like the permanent lowering of the larynx, the ability to control one’s breath, or the inclination of humans to imitate. In this paper I would like to point out another candidate for a preadaptation, namely (...)
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  37.  28
    In Defense of Question Diversity: Comments on Ciardelli.Manfred Krifka - 2021 - In Moritz Cordes (ed.), Asking and Answering: Rivalling Approaches to Interrogative Methods. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. pp. 55–62.
  38.  19
    List of Authors and Addresses.Johannes Bechert, Johan van Benthem, David Gil, Manfred Immler, Ekkehard Konig, Manfred Krifka, Godehard Link & Dietmar Zaefferer - 1991 - In Dietmar Zaefferer (ed.), Semantic universals and universal semantics. New York: Foris Publications. pp. 237.
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  39.  21
    A note on the gifted mathematician that you claim to be.Alexander Grosu & Manfred Krifka - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (6):1227-1233.
    The paper is a reply to Bassi and Rasin ( 2018 ) on the treatment of sentences like [_The gifted mathematician that you claim to be_] _should have solved this task without problems_ by Grosu and Krifka ( 2007 ), which was published in _Linguistics and Philosophy_. Grosu and Krifka provide an analysis of the _de dicto_ interpretation in which the bracketed expression refers to an individual concept. Bassi and Rasin question this because equivalent expressions in Hebrew, in which the (...)
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  40. 688 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Iwanska, Lucia Johnson, Mark Kadmon, Nirit K~ ilm~ n, L~ zlo.Hans Kamp, Boem-mo Kang, Paul Kay, Ali Kazmi, Edward L. Keenan, Jeff King, Ewan Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Manfred Krifka & William Ladusaw - 1995 - Linguistics and Philosophy 18:687-688.
     
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  41. 680 ACKNOWLEDGMENT King, Jeff Klein, Elaine Kobes, Bernie.Angelika Kratzer, Manfred Krifka, Bill Ladusaw, Shalom Lappin, Young-Suk Lee, Harold Levin, Godehard Link, Jan Tore LCnning, Peter Ludlow & Bill Lycan - 1995 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17:679-680.
     
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  42.  54
    A Second Look at Second Occurrence Expressions.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    Recent discussion of the meaning contribution of focus centered around the question of how focus information is integrated into semantic and pragmatic interpretation. One type of theory assumes that certain operators can make direct use of focus information. These theories stipulate that focus-sensitive operators like only or even, quantificational adverbials, and reason clauses have to be associated with a focus in their scope. Such “association with focus” theories have been proposed, for example, by Jackendoff (1972), Jacobs (1983), Rooth (1985), von (...)
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  43. Audiatur Vox Sapientia. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow.Manfred Krifka - 2001 - Academie Verlag.
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  44.  64
    Counting configurations.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    The sentence With these three shirts and four pairs of pants, one can make twelve different outfits does not entail that one can dress twelve persons. The article proposes an analysis of “configurational” entities like outfits as individual concepts. It investigates the interaction of noun phrases based on such nouns with temporal and modal operators and in collective and cumulative interpretations. It also discusses a generalization from tokens to types, as in with the seven pieces of a tan- gram set, (...)
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  45.  43
    Comment on the paper by Cleo Condoravdi.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    The following contribution1 was inspired by Cleo Condoravdi’s article on NPI licensing in temporal clauses (Condoravdi, this volume). Condoravdi gives a coherent and comprehensive account of be- fore which crucially involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true, and a modal component for non-factual interpretations. I argue for a nonmodal, non-coercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as ‘A is the case when B has not been the case’, triggering a conversational (...)
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  46.  33
    Chapter X case syncretism in German feminines: Typological, functional and structural aspects.Manfred Krifka - manuscript
    Modern Standard German does not have distinct forms for nominatives and accusatives in the feminine gender. This is not only unique within Germanic languages, but also quite remarkable from a typological and functional viewpoint, under the plausible assumption that feminine NPs do not differ in animacy from masculine NPs. I will discuss the loss of the N/A distinction for feminines in detail and speculate about possible reasons – among others, that the referents of feminines are not typically animate, that the (...)
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  47.  63
    Group Interaction in the Cockpit: Some Linguistic Factors.Manfred Krifka & Silka Martens - unknown
    For a number of years it has been recognized that the social dynamics of group interaction is an import factor in the origin of accidents and in the way how accidents or accident-prone situations are handled in aviation (cf. Helmreich 1997a, 1997b). Factors related to interpersonal communication have been implicated in up to 80% of all aviation accidents over the past 20 years. As a reaction to this, Crew Resource Management (CRM) has been developed with the goal of rating and (...)
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  48.  54
    In Defense of Idealizations: A Comment on Stokhof & van Lambalgen.Manfred Krifka - unknown
    I think that some of the arguments in this article are themselves flawed, or are based on an understanding of linguistics that is too narrowly focused on certain versions of generative grammar. For example, the argument that in computational applications purely statistical approaches are in general more successful than rule-based approaches has to be qualified: It holds, or may have hold, for certain applications like machine translation, but not for others, like the generation of text to answer queries to databases. (...)
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  49. Quantification across bantu languages.Manfred Krifka & Sabine Zerbian - manuscript
    to appear in Lisa Matthewson (ed.), Cross-linguistic perspectives on the semantics of quantification, Elsevier.
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  50.  7
    Quantification and Information Structure.Manfred Krifka - 2016 - In Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure. Oxford University Press UK.
    The chapter provides an overview of the interaction between quantification and information-structural properties, especially focus, givenness, and topic. While quantification affects truth conditions, information-structuring devices can have an effect on the interpretation of quantificational expressions. After a short introduction to the nature of quantification, the chapter covers the main areas where such effects have been identified, in particular in adverbial quantification, in generic clauses, in conditional sentences, and in sentences with nominal quantification, including intersective determiners and comparative determiners like most. (...)
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