LINGUIST List 11.1879

Thu Sep 7 2000

Qs: Phrasal Quantification, Deletion/Epenthesis

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Torodd Kinn, Phrasal quantification
2. Claire Bowern, Linguist seeking Language ...

Dear linguists,

I am looking for works on phrasal quantification.
English examples are "three bottles of wine" and "a lot of
people". I am particularly interested in those Germanic
languages where usually no preposition is used (the
Scandinavian ones, German, Dutch ...), but also English. In
German and Norwegian we find phrases like:

	drei Flaschen Wein / tre flasker vin
	eine Menge Menschen / ei mengd menneske

It is well known that both the first and the second noun
exhibit head properties, and an analysis based on
grammatical ambiguity has been proposed by Lars-Olof
Delsing in a principles-and-parameters framework.

I would be grateful for references to other analyses of
these constructions, especially DIACHRONIC, but also
synchronic ones. I'm working in cognitive linguistics
myself, but approaches of all persuasions are welcome.

If anyone expresses an interest, I'll post a summary of
references.

Thanks,

Torodd Kinn

		
		
I'm a linguist looking to meet a language that
		
1. has both prefixes and suffixes
2. does morphophonemic stuff to these affixes (eg doesn't allow vowels in 
hiatus, or doesn't allow consonant clusters)
3. deletes affix material in both prefixes and suffixes (eg, Ci-aRoot > 
CaRoot, Roota- iC > RootaC or the equivalent)
or
4. deletes root material at the expense of prefixes and suffixes (eg, 
Ci-aRoot > CiRoot, Roota-iC > RootiC). This may involve deleting the entire 
root.
		
So, my dream language is an exception to the often supposed rule that 
deletion/epenthesis is uni-directional (as in eg Ito (1986)). All 
interested languages should reply to me at bowernfas.harvard.edu.
		
Claire Bowern
		
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