Mal in NYC for Syntax Brown Bag

How extraposition and deletion explain quantified partitives.

Friday October 24, Mal Shah heads back up to the Big Apple to present his 888 work on quantified partitives, like "most of the least weasels," at NYU's Syntax Brown Bag series. His abstract is below.

In quantified partitives each/three/all... of the sheep, the quantifier behaves in some respects as if it composes with the downstairs NP sheep. I argue on empirical grounds that there is an NP serving as the complement of the quantifier, and that it is deleted under identity with the downstairs noun: each <sheep> of the sheep, after extraposition of of the sheep, This theory, which invokes phrasal deletion, has many advantages in comparison to theories that posit no silent NP (Gagnon 2013, Shin 2016), or those which posit an NP with a silent head (Jackendoff 1977, Kayne 2005). These advantages include (but are not limited to) explaining the full distribution of NP-modifiers in quantified partitives, as well as generalizing the semantics.