Making sense of variable number agreement in Russian

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Abstract

In this paper, we focus on Russian quantified noun phrases that are known to be able to trigger plural verbal agreement or no agreement at all. Descriptively, we offer a novel generalization: when such phrases trigger plural verbal agreement, they cannot be interpreted in the immediate scope of negation. We show that this generalization falls out if these plural-agreeing phrases are treated in semantics as individual-denoting choice-functional indefinites and not as generalized quantifiers. Theoretically, we speculate that interpretable number features are in principle incompatible with generalized quantifier denotations.

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About the authors

Natalia V. Ivlieva

HSE University

Author for correspondence.
Email: nivlieva@hse.ru
Russian Federation, Moscow

Alexander V. Podobryaev

HSE University

Email: apodobryaev@hse.ru
Russian Federation, Moscow

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