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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 47:2 (2023) ► pp.422–462

Universal quantifiers, focus, and grammatical relations in Besemah

ORCID logo | University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
This article describes adverbial universal quantification in Besemah, a little-described Malayic language of southwest Sumatra, and how the syntactic position of the quantifier relates to grammatical relations and information structure. Given previous descriptions of the relationship between quantifiers and grammatical relations, especially in western Austronesian languages (e.g., Kroeger 1993; Musgrave 2001), Besemah presents a unique system of universal quantification wherein adverbial universal quantifiers place severe restrictions on which arguments can be quantified. I argue that these restrictions are fundamentally different than those described as ‘quantifier float’ in other languages, but they are not incidental. Instead, these restrictions can be explained by the fact that the adverbial universal quantifier also marks focus in Besemah.
Keywords: symmetrical voice, universal quantifiers, grammatical relations, information structure, Austronesian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Quantifier float as an argument selector
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Voice and grammatical relations
  • 5.Universal quantification
  • 6.Restrictions on adverbial universal quantifiers
    • 6.1Explaining the APV restriction on universal quantification
  • 7.Universal quantifiers as focus markers in Besemah
    • 7.1Information structure
    • 7.2Focus-marking functions of the adverbial universal quantifier
    • 7.3Exhaustive interpretations as argument-focus
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 September 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20060.mcd
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