Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

(81) Let s,t ∈ N such that 0 < s,t s e &
| {x : Reading (e,I,x) & Book(x) |> t x
J’ai beaucoup lu de livres is true just in case there were many events of me bookreading,
and I read many books. Thus, I accurately account for both the multiplicity
of events requirement and the multiplicity of objects requirement, since these requirements
are straightforwardly built into the meaning of the quantifier.
Besides the fact that it gets the interpretations of QAD sentences right, the main argument
for a binary quantification approach to QAD is the following fact about BCP SF .
(83) BCP SF is unreducible to any iteration of unary quantifiers.
In other words, as I will show in the next section, a binary approach to the analysis
of QAD sentences in Standard French is necessary to get the truth conditions of QAD
sentences right. 5
5 Dekydspotter, Sprouse & Thyre (2001) assume a binary quantification for QAD; however, they take
it for granted that QAD constructions have the semantics of Krifka’s Event-Related readings, and follow
Doetjes & Honcoop (1997) in claiming that ER readings are derived by quantification over pairs. The assumption that QAD is somehow related ER readings is extremely problematic:
QAD simply does not have the properties of ER. For example, as shown above, QAD is possible when
ER readings of sentences are not (like in J’ai beaucoup appelé de mères), and ER readings do not have
a multiplicity of objects requirement. It is furthermore difficult to evaluate their proposal since they
give no semantic definitions for any of their quantifiers, and, in the structures they propose for QAD
54