Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

Only the (internal) arguments of V many enter into an “extended chain”.
In order to account for the multiplicity of events requirement, he proposes the following
principle:
(42) Un quantificateur dans SPEC de V’ est interprété comme spécificateur de ce
V’. (Obenauer (1994: 123, his (36))
A quantifier in SPEC V’ is interpreted as the specifier of this V’
In other words, he proposes that, despite syntactically binding the direct object, beaucoup
is semantically behaving like an adverb, i.e. binding the event argument of the
verb.
Finally, in order to account for the intervention effects found with the apprécier
class of verbs, Obenauer proposes that these verbs have [- count] QPs in their specifiers.
He claims that QAD is only possible with verbs with [+count] specifiers, and, to
ensure that this is the case, he proposes the condition in (43).
(43) Dans la QAD, le quantifeur lexical doit être [+dénombrable]. (Obenauer
(1994: 127, his (46))
In the QAD construction, the lexical quantifier must be [+count]
Although this analysis accounts the properties of QAD described in the previous section
from a syntactic point of view, it leaves open the major question of how the semantics
for the structures that Obenauer (among others) proposes is worked out. In
particular, we would like to know the exact nature of the empty category inside the de
phrases, and how beaucoup is binding both this empty category and the verb’s event
variable at the same time.
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