Proportionality and Conservativity in Turkish

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned with the form-meaning relations associated with two types of measurement constructions in Turkish: proportional measurement constructions (PMCs) and reverse proportional measurement constructions (rPMCs). We first take note of some syntactic differences between these constructions that play a crucial role in explaining their semantic properties. We claim that rPMCs exhibit non-conservativity effects due to the fact that the nominal expression (i.e. the substance noun) inside an rPMC is interpreted in its vP-internal position. PMCs, on the other hand, undergo DP-movement, as a result of which the substance noun is interpreted both in the tail and in the head of the movement chain. We show that the analysis developed in this paper accounts for the distribution of non-conservative readings of the context-sensitive proportional determiners many and few.