Information structure, quantifiers, and their interaction: From Basque to a comparative study – ISQI

Quantification has traditionally been of great interest to semanticists, logicians, as well as to philosophers of language, mainly due to the logical and mathematical properties shown by quantifiers (Qs). The logical study of quantification is as old as logic itself, it began with Aristotle’s syllogism twenty-three centuries ago, and has concentrated mainly on the meaning and inferential characteristics of Qs. Linguistic studies on quantification began much later, and questions about the topic of quantification has played and still do play a crucial role in the theoretical study of natural languages. In fact, the research on the compositionality and on the meaning of quantificational expressions has been of a great importance for the general theory of syntax and semantics in natural languages (cf. Montague 1973, Heim 1982, a.o.). Quantification can be investigated from two different and, at the same time, closely related perspectives: (i) from an internal perspective, focusing on the Qs themselves, their internal morphosyntactic structure and their basic semantic properties; (ii) from an external perspective, analyzing the Qs in context (that is, analysing the syntactic position and the semantic relationships established between the QPs and the rest of the elements in the sentences they occur).

The current project entitled Information Structure, Quantifiers, and their Interaction: From Basque to a Comparative Study (ISQI) will especially concentrate on the external perspective of quantification; specifically, it aims at studying the behaviour of quantificational expressions when affected by the information structure of a sentence, i.e. when quantificational expressions appear in e.g. focus position. For this reason, it will be necessary to first study the behaviour and the ‘internal’ (inherent) properties of the Qs themselves to then see how they behave ‘externally’.

Since two decades ago, there are some crosslinguistic studies of the internal structure of nominal Qs (cf. Bach et al. 1995, Matthewson 2008, Keenan & Paperno to appear), however cross-linguistic studies on nominal quantificational expressions from an external perspective are very scarce (cf. Szabolcsi 1997, Keenan & Paperno to appear; cf. Huang 1982, Lee 1986, Aoun & Li 1989 1993 for Chinese; Szabolcsi 1997, Szabolcsi & Brody 2003 for Hungarian, Pafel 2005 for German; Etxeberria 2002 for Basque). In this context, the aim of this project is to make a very interesting as well as important contribution to this study by examining in a comparative fashion the behaviour of Basque, French, English, Spanish, and Greek nominal Qs. Furthermore, this comparative study will allow the researchers of this project to conclude which (if any) of the existing analyses on Q scope are able to account for the data that we will collect (of sentences with two or more Qs in out of the blue contexts, and of sentences with two or more Qs where the readings are affected by information structure). Moreover, in case the existing analyses run into difficulty empirically, our goal is to propose a more fine-grained analysis that will be able to provide an explanation to the crosslinguistic differences.

The results that we will obtain from the present project will be valuable for syntacticians, semanticists, intonational phonologists and morphologists alike as well as for more traditional linguists interested in Basque, a language isolate with no known relatives. And it also comes to fill a gap for those interested in typological studies, as it will present in a coherent fashion the fundamental properties of the nominal quantificational system of five languages: Basque, English, French, Spanish, and Greek.