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A unified account of nominal distributivity, for-adverbials, and measure phrases
Lucas Champollion University of Pennsylvania and PARC Friday, April 24, 3:30pm, MJH Rm 126 I argue that the phenomena in (1-3) are related in a systematic way and I provide a unified analysis for them. (1) Distributive readings: Three boys wore a ring. (2) For-adverbials: John pushed a cart for an hour. / *John built a house for a week. (3) Pseudopartitives: three liters of water / *four degrees Celsius of water According to current analyses, (1) requires the VP to hold of every part of the sum denoted by the subject (Landman 1996, 2000); (2) requires the VP to hold at every part of the interval, which is incompatible with telic VPs (Dowty 1979, Moltmann 1991, Krifka 1998); and (3) requires a measurement scale on which every proper part of water is mapped to a smaller value than the whole, which is incompatible with temperature (Schwarzschild 2002, 2006). These analyses, however, do not formally relate (1)-(3). I derive their properties using a single operator whose components are independently motivated. My framework provides a novel argument in favor of a quantificational analysis of for-adverbials (with Dowty 1979, Moltmann 1991, contra Krifka 1998) and an improved account of distributivity and cumulativity which, unlike the systems reviewed in Landman (1996, 2000), generalizes beyond the two-quantifier case. More generally, existing analyses that were originally designed for only one of these phenomena can be generalized and compared to each other. Challenges, and sometimes their solutions, can be transported from one analysis to another across the related phenomena. 
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