Date: 19-Jan-2007 From: Ulrich Lueders <lincom.europat-online.de> Subject: On Quantification in Finnish: Suihkonen
Title: On Quantification in Finnish
Series Title: Lincom Studies in Uralic Linguistics 02
Published: 2007
Publisher: Lincom GmbH
http://www.lincom.eu
Author: 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.
Linguistic Field(s):
Morphology
Semantics
Syntax
Typology
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