Relative Measurement and the DP Border (DPBorder)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Artemis Alexiadou; Professor Dr. Uli Sauerland
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387623969

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

The conservativity universal is one of the best known language universals proposed within linguistic theory. It claims that quantificational expressions in any human language exhibit a link between the syntactic category “determiner” and the abstract logical property “conservativity” (i.e. Q(A)(B) = Q(A)(A ∩ B)). Namely, all quantificational determiner are claimed to be conservative. Originally proposed in the 1980s, much work has corroborated the validity of conservativity for many quantificational expressions across dozens of different, typologically diverse languages. Some potential counterexamples previously discussed had been seen to be non-conservative, but not determiners (only), while others had been argued to be determiners, but actually be conservative once the effects of vagueness are taken into account (most). The present project explored a class of expressions that Ahn & Sauerland (2017) had initially shown to challenge the conservativity universal in a novel way. Namely structures involving precise proportional measurement such as in the German sentence is “30% Frauen sitzen im Bundestag” (30 percent women hold seats in parliament). If “30%” is a determiner in the relevant sense, the German sentence violates the conservativity universal. The project carried out the first in depth investigation of relevant data in German, Greek and Italian, and furthermore collected additional work by experts on six further languages (Brazilian Portuguese, English, Korean, Mandarin, Slavic, and Turkish) in a special collection. Surprisingly, the project discovered that precise proportional measurement lead in many languages to violations of the conservativity universal as standardly understood. The project described novel links between case marking, number marking, definiteness, and agreement and how complex quantificational noun phrases involving measurement are interpreted that even the most detailed prior grammar studies had not noticed. For example, we refuted the claim that the difference in case marking that we find in German between “ein Glas deutsches Bier” und “ein Glas deutschen Bieres” always results in the same interpretation regardless of the case. On the basis of our novel empirical findings, we argue that the conservativity universal can be maintained after a slight restatement and that the restated universal is actually corroborated by the novel data from precise proportional measurement because the relevant structures are not simple determiner phrases, but appositive structures. The results of the project should be incorporated into future grammars of German, Greek and other languages, and are also important for the general theory of the syntax-semantics interface of measurement structures.

Publications

• Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 3(1).
  Tieu, Lyn; Pasternak, Robert; Schlenker, Philippe & Chemla, Emmanuel
  
• A lot of hatred and a ton of desire: intensity in the mereology of mental states. Linguistics and Philosophy, 42(3), 267-316.
  Pasternak, Robert
  
• An ambiguity account of degree achievements: Evidence from additive operators. In M. Baird & J. Pesetsky (Eds.), Proceedings of NELS 49 (Vol. 3, pp. 163–172). (2019a)
  Spathas, G.
  
• Decomposing scalar approximatives in Greek. Snippets, 37, 4-6.
  Alexiadou, Artemis
  
• Plural anaphoric reference and non-conservativity. Snippets, 37, 95-96.
  Spathas, Giorgos
  
• Unifying partitive and adjective-modifying percent. Snippets, 37, 77-79.
  Pasternak, Robert
  
• Compositional trace conversion. Semantics and Pragmatics, 13(14), 1-48.
  Pasternak, Robert
  
• Partitives, pseudopartitives and the prepositionapo in Greek. Linguistics, 58(3), 713-743.
  Alexiadou, Artemis & Stavrou, Melita
  
• German measurement structures: case-marking and non-conservativity. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 25(2), 221-272.
  Pasternak, Robert & Sauerland, Uli
  
• On the source of proportionality in nominal measurement: evidence from Greek. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 43(1).
  Spathas, Giorgos & Alexiadou, Artemis
  
• Special Collection: Non-Conservativity with Precise Proportions. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. (2023 edd.)
  Sauerland, U. & Pasternak, R.