Floating Quantifiers and Mapping Hypothesis

This paper examines behaviors of floating quantifiers in English and Korean, and provides analyses for them. These two languages have ordinary quantifiers and numeral quantifiers. Their syntactic behaviors are a little different in two languages, and those differences also make differences in their meaning. When they do not float, they can have both cardinal and presuppositional reading. When they float, however, they have only cardinal reading. For their analyses, this paper adopts Heim s tripartite structure and Diesing s Mapping Hypothesis. In those analyses, when QPs are mapped into restrictive clause, they have presuppositional reading. But, when they are mapped into nuclear scope, they have cardinal reading. In sum, this paper provides some theoretical accounts for ordinary and numeral quantifiers of English and Korean.