Watch Out for the Universal Quantifier
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Complex Visibles Out There. Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2014: Language Use and Linguistic Structure. |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://olinco.upol.cz/assets/olinco-2014-proceedings.pdf |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | negation; Slavic; free choice items; competition in grammar |
| Description | We build on the assumption of Pereltsvaig 2006 that Slavic FCIs don't occur in the scope of the sentential negation (although according to Kadmon and Landman 1993 the negation as DE operator should license them) because of the morphological blocking by negative indefinites (n-words). This explanation works in cases where both propositions (the one with an FCI and the other with an n-word) have the same meaning. That is not the case of (5) and (6); see the formalization in (7) for sentence in (5) and in (8) for sentence in (6). We extend the approach of Aloni 2007b and argue that the universal quantifier over alternatives introduced by the possibility modal context is responsible for the different truth conditional meaning of (5) and (6), which explains the fact that both FCI and n-words are acceptable in the same syntactic environment (in contrast to the sentential negation only). |
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