Quantification and Context in Measure Adverbs

Abstract

We present a universal quanti?er analysis of for-adverbs which builds on the notion of context-determined temporal partitions (Deo 2009) and intermediate distributivity (Schwarzschild 1996; Champollion 2010a, b). In contrast to the measure function analysis, this analysis places neither selectional restrictions on the arguments of for-adverbs, nor does it appeal to type-shifting coercion operators in accounting for iterative and imperfective readings associated with them. The proposal improves on earlier quanti?cational analyses in dealing with the minimal parts problem and the scopal restriction problem. Further, it also succeeds in capturing a robust psycholinguistic pattern of delayed and sustained cost associated with comprehension of for-adverbs composed with semelfactive/telic predicates, which until now had not been satisfactorily understood. It does so by attributing the cost, not to a mismatch-repair mechanism, but to the lexical and contextual mining necessitated in the retrieval of contextual information (a partition measure) without which the expression cannot be fully interpreted.