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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 245–258

Romanian dependent numerals as ratios

| Université Paris Diderot/CNRS

The aim of the paper is to present an account of Romanian cardinal DPs containing the distributivity marker câte (Dependent Numerals – DNums henceforth), with a view to a possible extension to other DNums attested cross-linguistically. The proposal adopted here is expected to extend to dependency markers which do not enforce their own distributivity and which obligatorily apply to monotonic measures (câte 200 de grame, ‘CÂTE 200 grams’ vs. #câte 20 de grade Celsius, ‘CÂTE degrees Celsius’). Firstly, distributivity is satisfied by co-indexation with a plurality of events which is independently provided. The indirect relation between the DNum and the participant or runtime sortal key translates as a ratio. A sentence such as The boys read CÂTE two books verifies the condition that the ratio of read books (SHARE) per reading boy (KEY) is two. Secondly, the monotonicity constraint is claimed here to be an outcome of the following facts: câte ranges over event-object pairs; it induces event-related (ER) interpretations via the same mechanism as cumulative ER cardinals discussed in the literature, which accounts for the monotonicity constraint.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Position with respect to previous analyses
    • 2.1DNums in the literature
    • 2.2Placing the present proposal into the picture
  • 3.The semantic properties of DNums – a look at the distribution
    • 3.1DNums as counting expressions
    • 3.2 Câte requires eventive sortal keys
    • 3.3 Câte as an event-object pair distributive marker
  • 4.The denotation of câte
    • 4.1How the ratio interpretation arises
    • 4.2More examples
  • 5.Consequences and conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.15pan
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