Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

110 Tomohiro Yanagi
The sentences in (1) involve the quantifier floating from the subject it modifies. 1
The positions of this floating quantifier are generally assumed to be the positions
a subject occupies in cyclically moving to the sentence-initial position as
in (2). By contrast, the quantifier cannot occur after an object NP unless it is followed
by a predicative complement. These facts have been discussed in generative
literature. 2
On the other hand, it seems that little attention has been paid to the quantifier
eall in Old English (OE) from a generative point of view. 3 This chapter therefore
focuses on the OE quantifier eall, and shows that eall in OE exhibits the same
distributional properties as the quantifier all in PDE. We also examine in what
positions the OE quantifier eall can occur.
2. PDE quantifier all
Before dealing with the OE quantifier eall data, this section reviews some syntactic
properties of the quantifier all in PDE. First, the PDE quantifier can ‘float’ from a
subject it modifies, as in (3b).
(3) a. All the students have finished the assignment.
b. The students have all finished the assignment. (Bobaljik 2003: 107)
In (3a) all occurs before the subject NP while all in (3b) occupies the position
between the two verbs have and finished.
Second, unlike the quantifier modifying a subject, the quantifier modifying an
object generally cannot follow the object, as in (4).
(4) a. * Mary hates the students all.
b. * I like the men all.
c. * I saw the men all yesterday.
However, these sentences become grammatical if the objects are pronominalized
as in (5).
1. In the recent generative framework the term ‘floating’ would be replaced by ‘stranded’, but
this paper uses the conventional term.
2. There are two major approaches to the floating quantifier: the stranding analysis (cf. Sportiche
1988; McCloskey 2000; Bošcović 2004, and others) and the adverbial analysis (cf. Williams
1982; Baltin 1995; Torrego 1996, and others). See Bobaljik (2003) for an extensive overview of
floating quantifiers.
3. For a diachronic study of the quantifier all and other quantifiers such as each, many, and
some, see Carlson (1978) and Lightfoot (1979).