Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Title: “Change in Progress: Present Day English ‘every’ and plural readings”

Abstract: Present Day English increasingly allows plural readings of every-DPs, as for instance in "everyone got together for the party." 

The talk contrasts the semantic contribution of Generalized Quantifier every-DPs and group denoting every-DPs. It is argued that Present Day English "every" is ambiguous between the two interpretations. I then go on to make two further points:

(i) Group denoting every-DPs are an innovation, and Present Day English shows change in progress by permitting them in increasing kinds of environments. I discuss evidence from corpora and from an ongoing experiment to substantiate this claim.

(ii) There is no close lexical semantic connection between the two readings of Present Day "every". The semantic change can be understood as an instance of Constant Entailments (Beck & Gergel 2015): In many sentence contexts, the expression leads to the same propositional meaning under the old and the new interpretation because simultaneously, its compositional environment changes. Thus we have interpretive stability under combinatory ambiguity. This circumstance facilitates semantic change.

Present Day English 'every' is located in a general trajectory of expressions of universal quantification, the Universal Semantic Cycle.