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Article published In:
Linguistic Variation
Vol. 19:2 (2019) ► pp.280–351

Quantifier particle environments

| University of Utah

I examine the set of environments in which KA-type quantifier particles appear crosslinguistically. These environments include interrogatives, disjunctions, indefinites, all of which arguably involve elements with Hamblin-type ‘alternative’ semantic values. I show that if KA-particles are assigned a uniform denotation as variables over choice functions we can account for their appearance in what otherwise appears to be a set of heterogeneous environments. Crosslinguistic and diachronic variation in the distribution of Q-particles – including, in some cases, the appearance of multiple morphologically-distinct Q-particles in different contexts – can be handled largely in terms of differing formal morphosyntactic features and/or pragmatic components of specific KA-particles. This study focuses on tracking the evolution of KA-type particles in the history of Sinhala, with comparison to other languages of the Indian subcontinent (including Malayalam and Tamil) as well as to Japanese, Tlingit, and English.

Keywords: quantifier particles, interrogatives, indefinites, disjunction, wh-words, choice functions, semantics, morphosyntax, Sinhala
Article outline
  • 1.Overview
  • 2.Language overview – examples
    • 2.1Sinhala
      • 2.1.1Modern colloquial Sinhala
      • 2.1.2Modern literary Sinhala
      • 2.1.3Classical Sinhala
      • 2.1.4Old Sinhala
      • 2.1.5Summary of the evolution of Sinhala particles da & hō
    • 2.2Dravidian
      • 2.2.1Malayalam
      • 2.2.2Modern Tamil
      • 2.2.3Old Tamil
      • 2.2.4Other remarks
    • 2.3Japanese
    • 2.4Tlingit
    • 2.5English
    • 2.6Summary
  • 3.KA in interrogatives
    • 3.1A Hamblin semantics of wh-words
    • 3.2Choice-functions & the denotation of Q-particles
  • 4.KA in disjunctions
    • 4.1Evidence for a category J(unction)
  • 5.Syntactic analysis
    • 5.1Modern colloquial Sinhala
    • 5.2Modern literary Sinhala
    • 5.3Early Sinhala
    • 5.4Old Malayalam
    • 5.5Modern Malayalam
    • 5.6Tlingit
    • 5.7Japanese
  • 6.Morphosyntactic & semantic/pragmatic variation crosslinguistically
  • 7.Comparison with other accounts
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.17007.sla
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