Title: On Quantification in Finnish
Series Title: Lincom Studies in Uralic Linguistics 02
Publication Year: 2007
Publisher: Lincom GmbH
http://www.lincom.euAuthor: Pirkko Suihkonen
Paperback: ISBN: 9783895868689 Pages: 228 Price: Europe EURO 78.00
Abstract:
"On Quantification in Finnish" deals with quantification of nominal and
adverbial phrases in Finnish and interaction between quantification and
various syntactic and semantic structures. The focus will be in description
of the NPs which syntactically are subjects and objects, and nominal
predicates (adjectives and nouns) which are called predicatives. The NPs
are classified into two structural types:
(a) NP = DET + N, where DET (determiner) is lexical,
(b) NP = DET + N, where DET is syntactically complex.
Description of quantification expressed at the phrasal level concerns, in
addition to the lexical quantifiers, also different kinds of quantifying
nouns and measuring terms, and a special attention is paid to complexity of
problems concerning description of these classes. The rich case marking
system of Finnish reflects sensitively the semantic of quantification. In
particular, it will be asked which determiners in the context DET + N
demand in the case marking the partitive case form of the noun. In
response, a semantic characterization will be offered. The preliminary
hypothesis is that the semantics of quantification strongly affects the
distribution of morphological case marking of noun phrases and combinations
of determiners in Finnish. We raise certain questions about quantifiers
which specifically concern the core quantification system of Finnish, and
do not arise in languages where the quantification systems have been
previously studied. The theory of Generalized Quantifiers forms the main
theoretical framework for the description of semantic properties of
quantifying determiners and lexical quantifiers. It will be shown that in
the semantic properties of generalized quantifiers there are powerful
semantic universals which can be used in description of typology of
quantification in natural languages.
Subject Language(s): Finnish (fin)
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