Abstract
Relative measures such as percent and thirds relate one quantity to another. We observe that, in several languages, determiner phrases containing relative measures can express two distinct construals: (1) The ‘conservative’ construal in The company hired 75 % of the women considers the ratio of the company’s female hires to all women. (2) The ‘non-conservative construal’ in The company hired 75 % women is instead concerned with the ratio of the company’s female hires to all the company’s hires. We show that other languages that distinguish the two construals using morphosyntactic means include German, Korean, Georgian, Greek, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. We argue that the non-conservative construal involves a different constituency of the measure construction. Both construals, however, derive from a structure where the measure structure forms a single DP. Therefore, our analysis of the non-conservative structures makes an argument that the Conservativity Universal may apply at an abstract level of structure rather than at the surface level.
Funding statement: This work was supported in part by BMBF Grant No. 01UG1411 and DFG grant SA 925/11-1.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Artemis Alexiadou, Stephanie Solt, and two anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this version of our paper, and Gennaro Chierchia, and Kazuko Yatsushiro, for helpful comments throughout the duration of the project leading up to this paper. We remain grateful to all the others mentioned in the acknowledgments of our 2016 papers (Ahn & Sauerland 2015a, b), especially the audiences at GLOW 38 at the University of Paris, and our consultants for particular languages: Silvia Darteni and Fabrizio Arosio (Italian), Ekaterine Egutia (Georgian), Benjamin Spector, Laurence B-Violette, Aurore Gonzalez (French), Andreea Nicolae (Rumanian), Suzi Lima (Brazilian Portuguese), Hongyuan Sun, C.-T. James Huang, and Edwin Tsai (Mandarin).
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