Clustering events for event-external quantification
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The sentence *Kim knocked on the door three times* is ambiguous between two readings: event-external (quantification over "occasions") and event-internal (quantification over "acts" within a single occasion) (e.g., Cusic 1981, Andrews 1983, Cinque 1999). In this talk, I focus on the role of the syntactic position of the multiplicative numeral in English for the rise of each of the interpretations described above. For instance, in *Twice, Kim knocked on the door three times* and in *Kim knocked on the door three times twice*, the sentence-initial and sentence-final *twice*, respectively, is interpreted high in the structure, and thus it unambiguously quantifies event-externally, whereas *three times* is interpreted low, and thus unambiguously counts individual knocks within each knocking series. I propose a syntactico-semantic account for this phenomenon. |
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