Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

and European French), such an approach is not commonly applied to variation in the
semantic domain. 3
Thus, while it might be reasonable to expect that all languages
may share certain core semantic features, it is not generally considered reasonable to
expect that, when it comes to finer grained semantic distinctions, languages that are
not closely related should have semantically similar or identical lexical items or even
identical modes of composition. For example, although very interesting, the fact that
English and Lilooet Salish differ in the syntactic form of their generalized quantifiers
is not particularly surprising, since English and Salish are otherwise syntactically very
different. However, looking at variation in the interpretation of strings of mutually intelligible,
related dialects allows us to start from the assumption that, in most respects,
the syntax of these languages is very similar, if not identical. We can therefore identify
subtle differences between the dialects that we can reliably attribute purely to the
semantics of their expressions.
The comparison of European and Canadian dialects of French lends itself especially
well to the study of semantic microvariation, since there is a great deal of evidence
that suggests that the French first spoken on Canadian soil after the colonization
of Canada in the 17th century was roughly the spoken language of urban France of
that period (Morin (2002)), i.e. the European ancestor of today’s standard dialect.
Because, for the most part, these dialects are mutually intelligible, and they have a
relatively recent common source, we can suppose that the intersection of their grammars
is extremely large. Thus, I claim that the discovery that one dialect has binary
adverbial quantifiers and the other one does not has the potential to inform us about
the syntactic and semantic role of binary quantification in human language, in a way
that discoveries about quantifiers in unrelated languages cannot.
3 One exception to this is Chierchia (1998)’s Nominal Argument Mapping Parameter; however this
is really more a claim about the syntactic realization of semantic properties, than about the properties
themselves.
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