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Agnes

Page history last edited by Anne Tamm 7 years, 10 months ago

Indeterminate-based Quantification --- Is It Quantificational?

 



The main concern of this contribution is the following puzzle: In Uralic languages bare indeterminate pronouns (or particle + pronoun complexes)
have been known to have a variety of readings; most prominent are indefinite construals,  well  within the Haspelmath spectrum (from specific-known to unknown--irrealis). Universal quantification is in principle expressible with 
indeterminates, but, to my knowledge, this is not a fully exploited option in these languages (unlike Japanese, where the combination of a pronoun 
with the particle MO  expresses universal quantification , cf. Kratzer--Shimoyama 2002). 

The questions that arise are 1) why universal readings  are not expressed with a pronoun +
particle complex, and 2) when there is such a complex (e.g. Hungarian minden-ki lit. every-who), why its behaviour is exceptional (compared to its 
indefinite counterparts such as vala-ki lit. VALA-who `someone'). 

A possible answer to this puzzle (relying chiefly on Old Hungarian data, together with samples from other Uralic languages) involves a blocking effect. 
In Old Hungarian the relevant factor may be  the presence of 
so-called A-quantifiers: quantificational affixes (e.g. OH -keed) quantified over events, while adverbial maximality operators  could involve collections in 
their entirety, "ignoring", as it were, single individuals. (This explanation entails that Hungarian minden `every'  needs to be re-examined, since,
according to the blocking argument, its very existence becomes a puzzle.)

 

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