Adverbial Quantification and (Un)Reducibility: The 'Quantification at a Distance' Construction in French

Abstract

In this paper, I present a compositional semantic analysis of the Quantification at a Distance (QAD) construction in the standard dialect of European French. I argue that quantification in a QAD sentence is done by a binary adverbial quantifier over the verb’s event argument and the direct object argument at the same time. I argue that the modeling of the interpretations assigned to QAD sentences necessarily involves a polyadic quantifier, since such a quantifier is unreducible to any iterations of unary quantifiers. I provide a compositional analysis of the construction based on previous treatments of the indefinites that appear in it as semantically incorporatednominals.