Abstract:
This dissertation discusses the nature of quantificational sentences with the quantifiers her “every” and bütün “all” in Turkish and investigates how quantificational sentences get interpreted in terms of collectivity / distributivity. Departing from previous approaches, the study proposes to examine the role each constituent of a sentence attributes to the interpretation of a sentence and claims that the distributive or collective interpretation of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its constituents pertaining to the notion of collectivity and of the way they are combined. The model proposed in the dissertation puts forward a computational interpretation mechanism referred to as the Modified Plus Principle which operates on the feature of [alphaCOLL] that every constituent in a structure is assumed to bring from the lexicon. This interpretation mechanism enables us to argue that lexical items associated with the [-COLL] feature such as the distributive predicates, the quantifier her “every” and singular nouns are potentially have a more influential role than the ones associated with the [+COLL] feature such as the collective predicates, the quantifier bütün “all” and plural nouns in interpreting a sentence as either collective or distributive.
