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The Sixth

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MALAY/INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS

3 - 5 August 2002

Nirwana Resort Hotel, Bintan Island, Riau, Indonesia


NP-Quantification in Malay
Rogayah A.Razak
Univ. Kebangsaan Malaysia

This paper looks at the types of quantifier raising in Malay sentences and the well-formedness constraints that control such movements. In Malay, quantifiers enter into scope relations among themselves and other logical elements in the sentence. We believe that sentences in Malay with quantifier-NPs are not ambiguous as such, but rather, are associated with more than one respective Logical Forms (LFs). A sentence with more than one Q-NP has more than one LF depending on the surface order of the Q-NP. We analyze simple quantified NPs and then move on to the complex quantified NPs which were found to result in two kinds of scope interpretations; NP-external and NP-internal readings. The NP-external interpretation is one which involves a Q-NP with a simple N0 adjoined outside the NP containing the quantifier and is mainly an adjunction to the IP node. Meanwhile, NP-internal quantification involves a complex NP with a noun head which takes on an XP complement. This kind of construction builds around itself boundaries out of which nothing can be extracted from it and nothing can govern into it . It is referred to as an 'island'. It is this type of NP construction which forms the NP-internal quantification. Due to the nature of quantification just outlined, we posit a locality constraint on the application of QR in Malay in order to avoid violating the island constraints concerned. Our discussion will involve examples ranging over single quantified sentences, double quantified sentences and multiple quantified sentences.


https://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/archive/ismil/6