Quantificational Strategies across Language Modalities

Abstract

Abstract. The study of quantification traditionally focused on structures where quantificational meanings are encoded in determiners. Only as a later development attention was paid to quantificational strategies that rely on adverbs, or affixes. In this paper I discuss three varieties of quantificational strategies attested in two sign languages (ASL and LSC) and argue that even the apparent instances of determiner quantification in those languages make use of the more "constructional" way of encoding quantificational meanings that partially reflect the mapping onto tripartite structures overtly. Further, lexical quantification is addressed in the domain of distributivity.

“More is up” for domain restriction in ASL

“…'All of the people in the world became vampires' #'All of my friends became vampires' early access Davidson, Gagne Sign languages have been argued to make overt certain aspects of linguistic structure that are covert in spoken languages, across several unrelated areas within semantics (Lillo-Martin & Klima 1990, Wilbur 2003, Zucchi 2004, Quer 2005, Wilbur 2008, Schlenker 2011, Caponigro & Davidson 2011, Quer 2012, Kuhn & Aristodemo 2017. This distinction in expression of quantificational domains in (3) above, then, raises questions about both the structure of the quantified noun phrase in ASL and also how it might shed light on the nature of domain restriction in language generally, a topic long of interest to those working at the syntactic/semantic/pragmatic interface.…”