Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät | Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie | Fachgebiete | Ostslawische Sprachen | Vortrag Berit Gehrke, Marcin Wągiel & Radek Šimík (Kolloquium Slawistische Linguistik)

Vortrag Berit Gehrke, Marcin Wągiel & Radek Šimík (Kolloquium Slawistische Linguistik)

Freitag, 9.12., 12:15-13:45 [zoom]
Berit Gehrke (HU), Marcin Wągiel (Olomouc/Wrocław) & Radek Šimík (Prag): Non-conservative construals with proportional quantifiers: Theoretical and experimental considerations

Expressions involving percentage quantifiers (e.g. fifty percent) can give rise to conservative as well as non-conservative readings (e.g. The company hired fifty percent of the women. vs. The company hired fifty percent women.). While in languages with articles this distinction correlates with a morphosyntactic distinction (of the women vs. women), in languages without articles, such as most Slavic languages, there is no morphosyntactic difference (e.g. Czech padesát procent žen). Gehrke & Wągiel (to appear) argue that the main means to differentiate between the two readings in Slavic is by word order: non-conservative percentage quantifiers have to appear VP-internal, even when they are in subject position (e.g. Ve společnosti Spedex pracuje padesát procent žen. ‘There are fifty percent women working at the company Spedex.’). In an alternative account of the non-conservative reading (in German and other languages), Sauerland & Pasternak (2022) propose that it necessarily involves focus within the NP that the percentage quantifier combines with. In this talk, we present experiments on Czech which tested different hypotheses that these two accounts make.