Summing Quantities of Objects at the Left Edge

Abstract

為了分析How many books did Ken borrow and Kim steal in total? 這類並列句賓語合成句型的句法生成，本文一方面運用了用以生成派生謂語的移位理論，另一方面發展了Chaves 2012年在Journal of Linguistics上所提出的關於並列句主語合成句型的理論。另外，文中也探討了用以構建派生謂語的移位的一些特點。

This paper analyzes the syntactic structure of the construction represented by How many books did Ken borrow and Kim steal in total?, in which the semantics of the left-edge nominal (e.g., how many books) is cumulatively “shared” by the objects of the two clausal conjuncts. While efforts have been made to analyze the semantics of the construction in the literature, the syntax of the construction has been understudied and been considered a challenge to generative grammar. Extending Chaves’s (2012 ‘Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings’, Journal of Linguistics 48:297-344) analysis for a subject-sharing construction, I propose a predicate-formation analysis for the construction. While providing a possible syntactic derivation for the construction, this research also probes the properties of the specific type of A-bar movement involved in the formation of a predicate.