earticle

영어

This paper attempts to provide a new perspective on floating quantifiers, which have been studied almost exclusively from a syntactic point of view. This paper proposes that floating quantifiers should be analyzed as pragmatic intensifiers that can occur in different positions in a clause. In other words, floating quantifiers are comparable to emphatic reflexives that induce a contrastive focus on the interpretation of a definite DP. Evidence in favor of this claim comes from the fact that floating quantifiers share a number of idiosyncratic properties with emphatic reflexives, which cannot be accounted for by positing syntactic movement or by treating floating quantifiers as adverbials. In addition, the positions of emphatic reflexives and floating quantifiers are affected by a pragmatically significant prosodic factor. The paper also suggests that floating quantifiers are partitives, claiming that quantifier-floating is not due to a lexical property of a given quantifier.