Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

involves unreducible binary quantification by an adverbial quantifier over both the verb
and the direct object. I then present a compositional semantic analysis for QAD and
show how it accounts for the many interesting properties of the construction.
2.1 Previous Analyses
In the literature on QAD, we find two styles of analysis: analyses that propose that the
preverbal position of the quantifier is derived via movement of the quantifier from a
prenominal position, and analyses that propose that the quantifier is base-generated as
a VP adverb. In this section, I first review the arguments for a movement analysis. I
then review the arguments for an adverbial (base-generation) analysis, and conclude
that an adverbial analysis should be adopted.
I then consider two adverbial analyses in detail, a syntactic one, Obenauer (1994)
and a semantic one, Heyd (2003)/Mathieu (2004). I argue that both of these analyses
capture a number of the facts about QAD; however, they do not account for all of them.
2.1.1 Movement Analyses
The most basic form of the movement analysis is the following,
(1) The Movement Analysis:
The Quantification at a Distance sentence is transformationally derived from
the Canonical Quantification sentence.
Thus, authors adopting such an analysis propose a structure for a QAD sentence similar
to (2)
(2) J’ai beaucoup i lu [t i [de livres]]
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