On Quantification in Finnish

Pirkko Suihkonen University of Helsinki

“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 adjectives and nouns in the predicative position. 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. 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.

Keywords: semantics, quantification, generalized quantifiers, quantification in Finnish.

ISBN 9783895868689. LINCOM Studies in Uralic Linguistics 02. 228pp. 2007.