The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, February 19th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566
Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Bernhard Schwarz (McGill) will be presenting “Hidden structure in the composition of degree DPs”. Here is the abstract:
- Consensus on the inventory of semantic primitives has yet to be reached. Degrees, for instance, are often treated as primitive semantic objects, but an alternative tradition —going back to Frege’s and Russell’s analyses of cardinal numbers— derives them as sets of amount-uniform ordinary objects (“rich degrees”) (Cresswell 1976, Klein 1980, Bale 2006).Potential motivation for the reductionist view comes from the external composition of definite DPs that combine degree nouns with nouns ranging over ordinary objects (e.g. “the number of cooks Bo hired”, with degree noun “number” and object noun “cooks.”) Such “degree DPs” can saturate predicates of objects (as in “Ai hired the number of cooks Bo hired”, with the predicate of objects “hired”), a pattern consistent with an analysis in which the degree noun heads the NP and the whole DP denotes a set of objects (cf. Scontras 2017).
We provide a semantic argument for an alternative syntactic analysis for cases when degree DPs are involved in object predication. The analysis holds that the NP within degree DPs is headed not by the degree noun but by the object noun (Alonso-Ovalle and Schwarz 2024). This structure derives the external compositional behavior of degree DPs with object predicates without invoking rich degrees, thereby undermining the purported support for the reductionist view. Our argument is based on the interpretation of degree DPs in intensional contexts.