FRENCH UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS IN CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS

This paper is an attempt to import what is known as algebraic semantics (Link 1983, 1986) into conceptual semantics (Jackendoff 1983, 1987, 1990) in order to provide a unified account of the universal quantifiers tout, tous and chaque, chacun in French. We show that the general principles for the determination of part structures provided for by algebraic semantics are exactly the ones we need in order to provide a unified account of French universal quantifiers in the conceptual semantics framework. The compatibility of these quantifiers varies with collective predicates, singular and collective nouns, and mass nouns, or when they are used as adverbials. We show that all of these differences can be predicted by postulating that the quantifiers select different types of parts for interpretation and that the types of parts selected for quantification are of the same kind whether the quantifier operates upon the nominal domain or the verbal domain. These types of parts are the ones provided to us by the lattice structure of algebraic semantic theories. We propose a unified syntactic representation for all universal quantifiers in French where the quantifier is a functional category that always selects a lexical category denoting the relevant part for quantification. Such a representation is motivated by a clear correspondence between syntactic categories and lattice-structure-endowed conceptual entities. We show that this analysis also explains some dialectal variation among quantifiers.