Quantificational cycles and shifts

Abstract

The chapter reports an inter-genetic diachronic study of quantificational particles, drawing from Indo-European and Japonic and making a case for diachronic typological approach to the syntax/semantics/pragmatics of quantificational meanings motivating a treatment of unidirectional semi- or fully cyclical change. Empirically, the quantificational expressions under investigation conform to the bimorphemic expression that comprises a wh-stem and a quantification particle (dubbed ‘superparticle’), e.g. *kwe in Proto-IE, and mo in Old Japanese. The grammaticalization of scalar universal quantifiers into negative polarity items (NPIs) in the history of Japonic is presented using a single feature-system change. What is more, the same feature system is assumed to underlie the aetiology of the ‘quantifier split’ in Indo-European. Theoretically, to present the fully explanatory view of the quantificational shifts and cycles, a novel model of a syntactico-centric pragmatics of grammaticized implicatures (Chierchia et al., 2012; Chierchia, 2013) is assumed.