Selected aspects of amount relatives: The Romanian-English connection

Alexander Grosu,Ion Giurgea

doi:10.31743/lingbaw.5625

Abstract

The inter-related goals of this paper are: (i) To contribute to a better understanding of the semantic and morphological properties of amount relatives in Romanian, (ii) to compare and contrast these constructions with their English counterparts, and (iii) to bring into bolder relief than has so far been done in the literature the fact that amount relatives in general are compatible not only with an amount denotation of the complex DPs that contain them, but with an entity denotation as well.

Highlights

The inter-related goals of this paper are: (i) To contribute to a better understanding of the semantic and morphological properties of amount relatives in Romanian, (ii) to compare and contrast these constructions with their English counterparts, and (iii) to bring into bolder relief than has so far been done in the literature the fact that amount relatives in general are compatible with an amount denotation of the complex DPs that contain them, but with an entity denotation as well
Ever since Carlson’s (1977) seminal article, it is has been widely assumed that the grammars of natural languages allow ‘amount relative constructions’, that is to say, complex DPs containing a relative clause in which abstraction targets an amount/degree variable
Grosu & Landman (1998, 2016), building on observations made by Carlson (1977), proposed that two properties of English amount relative constructions are traceable to the operation of Maximalization within CP

Summary

Background on entity-denoting amount relatives

Ever since Carlson’s (1977) seminal article, it is has been widely assumed that the grammars of natural languages allow ‘amount relative constructions’, that is to say, complex DPs containing a relative clause in which abstraction targets an amount/degree variable. McNally (2008) challenged Grosu & Landman’s analysis sketched in [E] above on both empirical and conceptual grounds, noting that Null Operators are compatible with abstraction over kinds, and proposing a partial analysis of such data that relies on kinds, while expressing doubts that entity-denoting complex DPs in general can be built on amount relatives. Her objections and counter-proposals were examined in detail in Grosu & Landman (2016, section 5.3), who argued – convincingly, in our view – that her empirical objections to.

Basic Romanian data with overt relative pronouns typed for degrees

Maximality in the amount relatives of English and Romanian

The division of labour between relativizers in English and Romanian

Summary and results