Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

The thesis is organized as follows: In the remaining part of this chapter, I present
the background theoretical assumptions concerning the semantics of noun phrases and
verbs that will be used in my account of QAD.
Chapter 2 presents an analysis of QAD in Standard French. I argue that, despite the
large amount of literature on the topic, there has yet to be an analysis that accounts for
semantics of the construction. I show that, not only does a binary quantification analysis
of SF QAD properly account for the interpretations assigned to QAD sentences, it
is the only way of doing so. I give a proof using Keenan (1992)’s Reducibility Equivalence
Theorem that the binary extension of beaucoup is unreducible to any iteration of
unary quantifiers. I therefore conclude that a polyadic approach to QAD phenomena is
not only possible, but necessary for the syntactic and semantic analysis of this famous
construction.
Chapter 3 presents a study of the QAD construction in Québec French. I argue
that adverbial degree quantifiers in QF are unary quantifiers with a large domain that
includes both event properties and individual properties. I then provide a historical
explanation for why adverbs in QF can quantify over individuals as well as events,
and discuss the consequences of such an explanation for current theories of semantic
change.
Finally, in chapter 4, I extend my “binary quantification" analysis of degree quantifiers
to anti-additive (negative) quantifiers, and argue that this is required to account
for the distribution indefinites headed by de in both dialects of French. Additionally, I
argue that adopting a polyadic analysis of both degree adverbs and anti-additive quantifiers
allows us to explain the "intervention" effects of these elements in the Split-
Combien construction, effects that have be traditionally attributed to Rizzi (1990)’s
Relativized Minimality.
9