Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

. Quatre mille navires sont passés par l’écluse l’année passée
Four thousand ships were passed through the lock the year last
‘Four thousand ships passed through the lock last year’
I therefore propose that speakers accepting (57) are not violating the Multiplicity of
Objects (MO) requirement; rather, they are giving the QAD sentence an Event-Related
reading. I have two arguments for this proposal.
Firstly, the vast majority of the speakers that accept (57) also accept the canonical
quantification sentence (61) in the same context.
(61) J’ai attrapé beaucoup de lions
I have caught a lot of lions
‘I caught many lions’
Not all speakers accept ER readings with adnominal quantifiers. It is therefore significant
that this reading is available for speakers with MO violations.
Secondly, we see that, for all speakers, even those accepting (57), QAD sentences
display a multiplicity of objects requirement in contexts where an ER reading is impossible.
We can construct such a context by using a concrete, well individuated noun
which cannot be interpreted as being time-dependent. A good example of this is
mère‘mother’. We see that in both French and English, (62) cannot be uttered in a
context in which I called only my own mother many times.
(62) J’ai appelé beaucoup de mères la semaine passée
I have called a lot of mothers the week last
‘I called a lot of mothers last week’
Correspondingly, for all speakers, (63) is bad in the same context.
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