Speaker: Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)
Title: Raising Verbs as Quantifiers
Time: Friday, Mar 20, 3:30-5:00pm
Place: 32-141
>Quantification over times and worlds in natural language is traditionally considered to be
syntactically implicit. More recently tenses and modals have been treated as syntactically explicit
quantifiers. I propose that new kind of evidence for the explicitly quantificational character of
raising verbs of the “begin” and “threaten” type can be obtained from their scope interaction with
the subject.
>Consider the following two scenarios:
>HI scenario
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: yes
>LO scenario
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: yes/no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: no
>The following English sentence may describe either situation (the ambiguity is enhanced by the
presence of the temporal adjunct). Notice that HI and the LO readings are logically independent.
>In April only Mary began to get good roles.
HI: ‘only Mary went from not getting good roles to getting them’
LO: ‘it began to be the case that only Mary is getting good roles’
>Other languages, Hungarian and Shupamem among them, have verb-initial orders that
unambiguously carry the LO reading. They do that in two different ways. In Hungarian, “only
Mary” is a nominative subject inside the infinitival complement (see Szabolcsi 2009). This talk
will focus on the Shupamem type, where the fronting of “begin” appears to assign “begin” wide
scope over the operator subject that has properly raised to the tensed clause. I will argue that
“begin” does not only have quantificational content but explicitly quantifies over a time
argument. Possibly the argument carries over to “threaten” type verbs binding a world argument.
Kusumoto 2005, On the quantification over times in natural language. Natural language
Semantics 13: 317-357.
Lechner 2007, Interpretive effects of head movement. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000178
Schlenker 2006, Ontological symmetry in language: A brief manifesto. Mind and Language 21:
504-539
Szabolcsi 2009, Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian. To appear in
den Dikken & Vago, eds. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jBkM2QxZ/