Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

. Elle vient d’avoir beaucoup d’ennuis
She came to have a lot of troubles
‘She has just acquired a lot of troubles’
(26) a. *Il vient de beaucoup boire de lait
He came to a lot drink of milk
b. *Elle vient de beaucoup avoir d’ennuis
She came to a lot have of troubles
Again, these data suggests that QAD is quantification over an event variable: if the
events involved in the context in which the sentence is uttered are not many, the sentence
is bad.
A third way of seeing that QAD is adverbial quantification as opposed to quantification
over the direct object is presented by Burnett & Bouchard (2008). By constructing
sentences with a collective predicate like réunir ‘to bring together’, a verb
that requires multiple participants in order to form a single event, we can disrupt the
usual one-to-one relation between events and objects. We can observe that Canonical
Quantification sentences and QAD sentences have different preferred readings.
(27) J’ai réuni beaucoup de personnes
I have brought together a lot of people
‘I brought together many people’
In the canonical quantification sentence (27), the most salient reading is one in which
there are many people involved in a single event. However, this is not the case with the
corresponding QAD sentence.
(28) J’ai beaucoup réuni de personnes
I have a lot reunited of people
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