When a quantifier is not a quantifier: Non-conservative percentage expressions in German

Abstract

In this paper we discuss percentage expressions of the type ‘fifty percent’ in German and two readings they give rise to, a conservative and a non-conservative one. Based on a questionnaire and a corpus study, we show that the non-conservative reading does not just need a bare, non-genitive-marked nominal to arise, but is also conditioned by word order (it has to appear low) and by the types of predicates that allow for it (in essence, predicates that can be used as existential or HAVE-predicates). We propose an account, under which the percentage expression is a type of scalar modifier that has an apparent effect on the predicate due to semantic incorporation ((in)transitives) and to an existential structure (intransitives).