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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 47:2 (2023) ► pp.422–462

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Universal quantifiers, focus, and grammatical relations in Besemah

ORCiD logo with link | University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Published online: 13 September 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20060.mcd
Abstract
This article describes adverbial universal quantification in Besemah, a little-described Malayic language of southwest Sumatra, and how the syntactic position of the quantifier relates to grammatical relations and information structure. Given previous descriptions of the relationship between quantifiers and grammatical relations, especially in western Austronesian languages (e.g., Kroeger, Paul. 1993. Phrase structure and grammatical relations in Tagalog. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2001. Non-subject arguments in Indonesian. Melbourne: University of Melbourne PhD dissertation.), Besemah presents a unique system of universal quantification wherein adverbial universal quantifiers place severe restrictions on which arguments can be quantified. I argue that these restrictions are fundamentally different than those described as ‘quantifier float’ in other languages, but they are not incidental. Instead, these restrictions can be explained by the fact that the adverbial universal quantifier also marks focus in Besemah.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Quantifier float as an argument selector
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Voice and grammatical relations
  • 5.Universal quantification
  • 6.Restrictions on adverbial universal quantifiers
    • 6.1Explaining the APV restriction on universal quantification
  • 7.Universal quantifiers as focus markers in Besemah
    • 7.1Information structure
    • 7.2Focus-marking functions of the adverbial universal quantifier
    • 7.3Exhaustive interpretations as argument-focus
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
References (47)
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