Summary
In this paper, I have proposed a compositional semantic analysis of exception NPs from which three core properties of exception constructions could be derived. I have shown that this analysis overcomes various empirical and conceptual shortcomings of prior proposals of the semantics of exception sentences. The analysis was first formulated for simple exception NPs, where the EP-complement was considered a set-denoting term and the EP-associate was a monadic quantifier. It was then generalized in two steps: first, in order to account for quantified EP-complements, and second, in order to account for polyadic quantifiers as the EP-associates. An additional assumption that was made in several places was that EPs may operate at the level of implications. The consequences of this assumption, though, still have to be investigated.
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The material discussed in this paper was in part presented already in a chapter of my dissertation (Moltmann 1992a). However, that chapter was rather descriptive in nature and no proper semantic analysis was developed.
I would like to thank Johan van Benthem, Jaap van der Does, Kit Fine, Jeroen Groenendijk, Makoto Kanazawa, Ed Keenan, Robert Stalnaker, Martin Stokhof, Anna Szabolsci, Frank Veltman, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the University of Amsterdam, UCI, UCLA, and the University of Stanford for very helpful discussions and comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Moltmann, F. Exception sentences and polyadic quantification. Linguist Philos 18, 223–280 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00985445
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00985445