Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Universal versus Existential Quantifiers
The Russian vsjakij
By Georgy Bronnikov
The quantifier vsjakij has drawn considerable attention from semanticists in the Russian tradition. This article proposes an analysis based on the morphological structure of the word, using Carlson’s (1977) theory of kind reference. The result is an account that allows us to give a unified treatment to generic [sic] and existential uses of vsjakij, which, to my knowledge, has never been done before. There remain a number of problematic cases; those are noted and, where possible, analyzed as well. If the proposed account is correct, vsjakij turns out to be a near-exception to a well-known universal stating that no language has determiners specialized for kind reference (see, for example, Gerstner-Link and Krifka 1995, p. 967, Dayal 2004, p. 394).
Source: Semantics Archive
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 14:24 GMT
Updated: Monday, 6 March 2006 14:28 GMT
