:This paper proposes an analysis of the semantics of even that is consistent with the assumptions about the syntax and semantics of negation in Collins and Postal. First, I review the distribution of negation, showing how negation may modify quantificational expressions where it gives rise to scope freezing effects. Second, I discuss the fact that even-phrases can be modified by negation, as in Not even John is there. On the basis of this fact, I argue that even is a quantifier. (...) Lastly, I show that my data provides new empirical support for the assumption that there are two kinds of even, depending on the role played by focus in the scalar presupposition. (shrink)

It is well known that the interpretation of quantificational expressions in the comparative clause poses a serious challenge for semantic analyses of the English comparative. In this paper, we develop a new analysis of the comparative clause designed to meet this challenge, in which a silent occurrence of the negative degree quantifier no interacts with other quantificational expressions to derive the observed range of interpretations. Although our analysis incorporates ideas from previous analyses, we show that it is able to account (...) for a broader range of facts than other approaches, with a minimum of construction-specific stipulations. We demonstrate that the analysis can be embedded within a general syntactic and semantic architecture for the comparative, and although our analysis focuses on the English data, we give evidence of its potential for crosslinguistic application. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our approach for the analysis of “split-scope” phenomena in nominal quantification. (shrink)