Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

Therefore, one might wonder if the presence of properly polyadic lexical items in the
grammar is limited to items whose main purpose in the language is to express these
properties of relations.
Micro-comparative work shows that conceptual anaphoriticy is not a necessary
property of polyadic quantifiers. My study suggests that binary quantification can develop
to serve a different function in the grammar: it can arise as a way to achieve semantic
well-formedness (i.e. interpretability) of a particular syntactic structure. Since
the only properties that SF beaucoup can apply to are event properties, the only way of
constructing an interpretable structure with a de phrase direct object is to have beaucoup
apply to binary relations. We know that the quantification involved in SF QAD
sentences is of a different type from the quantification induced by different or same,
since in a different dialect, we find a unary quantifier with the same core meaning.
In other words, unlike the meanings of different, same, or else, there is nothing inherently
relational about the concept of ‘a lot’-ness, and we know this because, in a
mutually intelligible dialect, this concept is expressed with a unary quantifier. This
thesis therefore serves as an example of how the formal study of semantic dialectology
has an important place in the study of the semantic component of the human language
faculty.
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