Abstract
This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving a compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boolos, George: 1981, ‘For every A there is a B’,Linguistic Inquiry 12(3), 465–467.
Bresnan, Joan: 1982, ‘Polyadicity’, in J. Bresnan (ed.),The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 149–172.
Condoravdi, Cleo: 1992, ‘Individual-Level Predicates in Conditional Clauses’, paper presented at the LSA meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
Davidson, Donald: 1967, ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, reprinted in D. Davidson, 1980,Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 105–121.
Dowty, David: 1978,Word Meaning and Montague Grammar, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Heim, Irene: 1982,The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Higginbotham, James: 1985, ‘On Semantics’,Linguistic Inquiry 16(4), 547–593.
Hinrichs, Erhardt: 1986, ‘Temporal Anaphora in Discourses of English’,Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 63–82.
de Hoop, Helen and Henriette de Swart: 1992, ‘Indefinite Objects’, in R. Bok-Bennema and P. Coopmans (eds.),Linguistics in the Netherlands, Foris, Dordrecht, pp. 91–100.
Kamp, Hans: 1981, ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation’, in J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen and M. Stokhof (eds.),Proceedings of the Third Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam Mathematical Centre, part 1, pp. 277–321. Reprinted in J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen and M. Stokhof (eds.), 1984,Truth, Interpretation and Information, GRASS 2, Foris, Dordrecht, pp. 1–41.
Kratzer, Angelika: 1989, ‘Stage-level and Individual-level Predicates’, ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Landman, Fred: 1993, ‘Events and Plurality’, ms., Tel Aviv University and Cornell University.
Larson, Richard: 1985, ‘Bare-NP Adverbs’,Linguistic Inquiry 16(4), 595–621.
Lewis, David: 1975, ‘Adverbs of Quantification’, in E. L. Keenan (ed.),Formal Semantics of Natural Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–15.
Link, Godehard: 1987, ‘Algebraic Semantics of Event Structures’, in J. Groenendijk, M. Stokhof and F. Veltman (eds.),Proceedings of the Sixth Amsterdam Colloquium, ITLI, Amsterdam, pp. 243–262.
McNally, Louise: 1992, ‘Adjunct Predicates and the Individual/Stage Distinction’, ms., Indiana University.
Parsons, Terence: 1990,Events in the Semantics of English, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Postal, Paul and Geoffrey Pullum: 1988, ‘Expletive Noun Phrases in Subcategorized Positions’,Linguistic Inquiry 19(4), 635–670.
Stump, Gregory: 1985,The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I should like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Angelika Kratzer and Irene Heim, Fred Landman, and audiences at Cornell University and the Eighth Annual Conference of the Israeli Association for Theoretical
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rothstein, S. Adverbial quantification over events. Nat Lang Seman 3, 1–31 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01252883
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01252883