SUMMING QUANTITIES OF OBJECTS AT THE LEFT EDGE
Niina Ning Zhang
This paper analyzes the syntactic structure of the construction represented by How many books did Ken borrow and Kim steal in total?, in which the semantics of the left-edge nominal (e.g., how many books) is cumulatively “shared” by the objects of the two clausal conjuncts. While efforts have been made to analyze the semantics of the construction in the literature, the syntax of the construction has been understudied and been considered a challenge to generative grammar. Extending Chaves’s (2012 ‘Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings’, Journal of Linguistics 48:297-344) analysis for a subject-sharing construction, I propose a predicate-formation analysis for the construction. While providing a possible syntactic derivation for the construction, this research also probes the properties of the specific type of A-bar movement involved in the formation of a predicate.
Keywords: sharing, coordination, quantity, cumulative, add, predicate abstraction
