This papers argues that the apparent constraint of adverbials like 'for two hours' (or 'throughout the house') should not be viewed as a restriction to telic events or event predicates, but should be explained entirely in terms of the quantificational status of such adverials, acting as quantifiers over (contextually individuated) parts of a time interval (or spatial region).

This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

This book is a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Utrecht. It was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. H. Schultink. I would like to express my gratitude to him for his criticisms of earlier versions which led to many improvements, in particular with respect to the exposition of the argument. To my co-referent Dirk van Dalen, reader in the Department of Philo sophy (,Centrale Interfaculteit') of the University of Utrecht, I am greatly indebted (...) for his valuable and fruitful suggestions about problems relevant to both linguistics and logic. Several ideas developed in this study owe their present concrete form to our many discussions. This thesis originates in syntactic research into the Aspects carried out in 1967 under the supervision of Albert Kraak, professor at the University of Nijmegen, who ever since gave much attention to my work in progress. I am very grateful to him for his careful and stimulating criticism as well as for the continuous support he gave me during these years. The present study closely relates to the work of my colleague Wim Klooster with regard to both its theoretical framework and its subject matter. Our joint work on the measurement of duration in Dutch is an integral part of the argument. I have greatly profited from the numerous discussions we have had. (shrink)

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...) mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are (at least) two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with plural (...) agreement features can ‘release’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations with singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology. (shrink)

The semantics of directional prepositions is investigated from the perspective of aspect. What distinguishes telic PPs (like to the house) from atelic PPs (like towards the house), taken as denoting sets of paths, is their algebraic structure: atelic PPs are cumulative, closed under the operation of concatenation, telic PPs are not. Not only does this allow for a natural and compositional account of how PPs contribute to the aspect of a sentence, but it also guides our understanding of the lexical (...) semantics of prepositions in important ways. Semantically, prepositions turn out to be quite similar to nouns and verbs. Nominal distinctions (like singular and plural, mass and count) and verbal classes (like semelfactives and degree achievements) have their prepositional counterparts. (shrink)

(1) a. The fog extended from London toward Paris. (the state reading is an extent reading (Jackendoff 1990)) b. Debris covered the outfield. c. Water filled the glass.