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1 - Proportional Many/Much and Most

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2021

By
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin  and
Ion Giurgea
Edited by
Hana Filip
Hana Filip
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

This chapter concerns the proportional readings of many and most, for example, where many/most students are smart means ‘the ratio of smart students to non-smart students is high/greater than 1:1’. The authors argue for a GQ analysis of proportional most over Hackl’s adjectival analysis based on distributional differences between relative most (the most P) and proportional most (most P). This GQ analysis is also shown to be supported by morpho-syntactically complex realizations of proportional most, such as the Romanian cei mai mulţi ‘the.MPL more many.MPL’ and cele mai multe ‘the.FPL more many.FPL’. Turning to proportional many, they argue that it shares a syntactic position with cardinal many, namely, SpecMeasP below Det. For the semantics of proportional many, building on Solt’s degree-theoretic approach based on measure functions with a cardinality dimension, the authors propose that measure functions themselves can have a proportional interpretation, based on proportional scales, in which the measure of the entity across a certain dimension is evaluated with respect to the measure of a ‘whole’ in which that entity is included.

Keywords

proportional mostrelative mostRomaniandegree semanticsmeasure function
Type
Chapter
Information
Countability in Natural Language , pp. 14 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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