What do quantifier particles do?

Abstract

In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do these have a unified semantics, or do they merely bear a family resemblance? Are they aided by silent operators in their varied roles-if yes, what operators? I dub the particles "quantifier particles" and refer to them generically with capitalized versions of the Japanese morphemes. I argue that both MO and KA can be assigned a stable semantics across their various roles. The specific analysis I offer is motivated by the fact that MO and KA often combine with just one argument; I propose that this is their characteristic behavior. Their role is to impose semantic requirements that are satisfied when the immediately larger context is interpreted as the meet/join of their host's semantic contribution with something else. They do not perform meet/join themselves. The obligatory vs. optional appearance of the particles depends on whether the meet/join interpretations arise by default in the given constellation. I explicate the proposal using the toolkit of basic Inquisitive Semantics.

Two Alternatives for Disjunction: an Inquisitive Reconciliation

“…Namely, since the join operator in inquisitive semantics generates multiple alternatives and therefore gives rise to inquisitiveness (unlike the other basic algebraic operations, as witnessed by the examples involving conjunction and negation in Figure 6), it is to be expected that words which are used to express the join operation, i.e., disjunction words, may also function as question words. Interestingly, it has been observed that this is indeed the case in many languages (see, e.g., Jayaseelan, 2008;Cable, 2010;AnderBois, 2011;Slade, 2011;Szabolcsi, 2015). This is illustrated in (7) with Malayalam -oo and Japanese ka:…”

“…AnderBois (2012) and Szabolcsi (2015) propose an account of this phenomenon in inquisitive semantics, suggesting that the inquisitive join operator can indeed be seen as the semantic common core of disjunction words and question words in languages like Malayalam and Japanese.…”

A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle <i>ka</i> in indefinites, questions and disjunctions

“…Following the structure of complex coordinations adopted in the literature on the crosslinguistic syntax and semantics of coordinations (den Dikken 2006;Slade 2011;Mitrovič & Sauerland 2014;Szabolcsi 2015b) I assume that ka-disjunctions involve a Junction head (hereafter J) with ka-phrases both in its internal argument position and in the specifier. The structure is schematized as follows: (51) A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle ka 25…”

“…The unified analysis of indefinites and questions in terms of alternatives has been extensively defended at least since Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002), and the extension of this program to the JP structure is undertaken by Mitrovič & Sauerland (2014) and Szabolcsi (2015b). The role of Q-particle as an operator that brings the alt-value of the prejacent to the o-value is proposed by Beck (2006) and Kotek (2014), and is shown to have further positive consequences for independent empirical problems such as the interpretation of multiple wh-questions.…”

Lifting conditionals to inquisitive semantics

“…On the one hand, inquisitive semantics provides a framework in which declarative and interrogative clauses can be given a uniform analysis; on the other hand, by refining the notion of meaning, it also allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the semantics of some operators, such as disjunction. These features have been fruitfully exploited in recent work, both in linguistics (a.o., AnderBois 2012AnderBois , 2014Coppock & Brochhagen 2013;Szabolcsi 2015;Roelofsen & Farkas 2015;Theiler, Roelofsen & Aloni 2016), and in logic (a.o., Ciardelli & Roelofsen 2015b;Ciardelli 2016). …”