Abstract
This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in "I regretted it every time I had dinner with him." Sentences of this kind display what I call a 'matching effect'; they are true if every event in the denotation of time I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form "There are at least as many As as Bs." The difficulties of giving a compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema "For every A there is a B" and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-31 |
Number of pages | 31 |
Journal | Natural Language Semantics |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 1995 |