Habituals, Frequency Relatives and Sum Situations.

Abstract

This paper offers a solution to the following problems concerning frequency relatives like “When she was drunk, which was often, Mary smoked”: (a) Why do frequency relatives only co-occur with restrictive when/if -clauses in habitual/generic sentences?, (b) What is an antecedent of the relative pronoun which? and (c) What type of copular sentences do frequency relatives belong to? It is proposed that adverbs of quantification should explicitly specify sum situations in logical representations of habitual/generic sentences. Under the assumption that frequency relatives are specificational, it is argued that the pre-copular relative pronoun ought to have a logical representation containing a sum-situation variable, and the post-copular adverb of frequency functions as a value assigned to the variable.