Structural and scopal asymmetries in the syntax of relative measurements

Overview

Relative measurement is the study of linguistic measure phrases utilizing proportional expressions, like percent or thirds. In various stages of research-related work, I study the distribution of relative measure phrases across English and comparatively distinct languages such as Mandarin and German. Overviewing recent literature and providing novel observations, I rely on the formal linguistic frameworks of degree semantics, alternative semantics, and generative syntax, where percent represents a proportion-based function mapping numerals to quantificational elements.

Research output

Associated publications/proceedings:

Kato, Andrew. To appear. Constraining the movement of a relative measure. University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics (ed. Adeline Braverman). Seattle, WA: University of Washington. [see 'manuscript to-appear' tab in the top-right]

Kato, Andrew. To appear. Partitivity and percent. Proceedings of EULC 5. Atlanta, GA: Emory University.

Associated conference presentations:

June 2024: Restricting the scope of a relative measure. LURC. UC Santa Cruz.
May 2024: Constraints on relative measure semantics. NWLC 40. University of Washington.
April 2024: Partitivity and percent. EULC 5. Emory University (online).
April 2024: Relative measures and the interpretation of proportional alternatives. University of Wisconsin-Madison Workshop in General Linguistics.
March 2024: The scope-taking of relative measurements. 16th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Koret Foundation, whose scholarship helped cover travel costs related to conference presentations. The mentor for this project has been Haoze Li, who I am extremely grateful to for originally bringing this topic to my attention. I am also grateful to comments and feedback from a number of individuals over the past year, including Tania Ionin, Jess Law, Roumyana Pancheva, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers.

Contact

Email: anmkato@ucsc.edu
Site: andrewmkato.github.io