Be careful where you float your quantifiers

Abstract

The paper examines the issue of why floating quantifiers are disallowed in the object position of passive and ergative verbs under Sportiche's (1988) stranding analysis of quantifier float. It is shown that the issue is part of a broader descriptive generalization that quantifiers cannot float in τ-positions. The generalization is shown to follow from an interaction of independently motivated assumptions concerning the structure of floating quantifier constructions and the mechanism of adjunction. The analysis of quantifier float proposed in the paper is shown to have important consequences for a number of issues and phenomena, including clausal structure, PP structure, object shift, cliticization, V-movement, Case licensing, small clauses, scope reconstruction, pied-piping, and heavy NP shift. Regarding PP structure, the paper pursues the clause/PP parallelism hypothesis: It is shown that there is a clause/PP parallelism with respect to Case-licensing, V/P movement, cliticization, and object shift.