Quantifiers and Intervention Effects: An Experimental Investigation

Jegal, Min

doi:10.30961/lr.2021.57.3.265

Lang. Res. 57(3):265-305

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2021.57.3.265

Article

Quantifiers and Intervention Effects: An Experimental Investigation

Min Jegal ¹ ^, ^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹Kyungpook National University

^†Corresponding Author: E-mail: 177117now@gmail.com

ⓒ Copyright 2021 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jan 01, 2021 ; Revised: Aug 09, 2021 ; Accepted: Sep 17, 2021

Published Online: Dec 31, 2021

ABSTRACT

This study investigates why some quantifiers incur intervention effects while others do not at LF. Based on the understanding that controversial acceptability judgments of the relevant sentences make it difficult to precisely distinguish interveners from non-interveners, this study tests Korean intervention constructions via a formal experimentation. With reliable data from the experiment, I argue that an intervening factor is linked to the epistemic “non-specific” property and there is no absolute set of intervening quantifiers. The intervening status of a quantifier can be “off” when the addressee perceives it as a particular individual by context or real-world knowledge. This novel perspective provides a more convincing and unified account of the intervention phenomenon and its gradience in acceptability than previous studies in which the effect of “context” is ignored or underestimated.

Keywords: intervention effects; quantifiers; scrambling; embedding; D-linking; specificity

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