This paper shows that the property of ‘quantization’ motivates object movement to the projection of Aspect, giving rise to telic interpretation. It will be shown that the telic aspect, once coupled with the structural architecture developed by Borer (2006) and Miyagawa (2013), effectively captures mitigation effects that arise in sentences containing temporal or goal PPs/adverbs. This approach, if retained, will provide substantial support for Bošković’s (2004) observation that quantifiers cannot be floated in θ-positions, in full accord with the minimalist assumptions.

Based on the well-known but less studied patterns of quantifier structures in Korean, this article claims that floating quantifier constructions and their non-floating counterparts are underlyingly distinct and that the bifurcation follows from Chomsky’s (1995) economy principle of derivations. This analysis of quantifiers has important consequences for several issues and phenomena, including scope facts, presence or absence of floating numeral quantifiers across languages, and pronominal alternations in English. It also has theoretical implications of eliminating the concept of pied-piping from grammar, a desirable result under the minimalist tenet of economy.

The goal of this paper is to show that the phenomenon of BQFT (ban on quantifier float in θ-positions, cf. Bošković 2004) can be deduced from the split DP structure, which states that a DP is a derived constituent but not an underlying one (Sportiche 2005 and Takahashi and Hulsey 2009). Combined this type of the structure with the locality condition of FQs, i.e., an FQ and its host DP must be adjacent, it follows that an FQ would not take place in θ-positions where its licensing DP is absent. An FQ requires a semantically contentful DP to be construed with it and therefore can only appear in those positions where such a DP is available. It is also shown that the proposed analysis has desirable consequences for several issues and phenomena including the stranding/adverbial properties of FQs, A- or A’-nature of movement and the LF-interpretability.

Bošković (2004) argued that a quantifier cannot float in θ-positions in English, German and other several languages. In this paper, I strengthen this generalization by offering an independent set of arguments from Korean and Japanese. It will be shown that floating numeral quantifiers in these languages pattern precisely like the quantifiers in other languages, so that they only occur in non-θ-positions. Notwithstanding these gratifying results, several gaps in the generalization remain to be explained. In this paper, I argue that these and other related questions are adequately resolvable under the DP Split Hypothesis, proposed by Takahashi and Hulsey 2008 (see Sportiche 2005 for a similar argument), the essence of which is that A-moved subjects need not have a full set of DP in θ-positions. More specifically, an FQ cannot occur in θ-positions because there is no complete DP to which it can be merged in θ-positions. It can only occur in non-θ-positions when a full-fledged DP is available.

Contrastively marked topic expressions are peculiar in that they are normally interpreted in a higher position in structure, while they have to be able to take lower scope than other quantifiers in a sentence. Extensive linguistic research into this puzzling paradox over the past decades has unearthed a wealth of empirical findings; nonetheless, the key question of what contributes to the CT paradox is still left unanswered. This paper, based on the observation that a CT-marked universal quantifier is an NPI in Korean, provides a reason why CT-phrases have to be interpreted in a lower position in structure; the lower-copyinterpretation is required by the NPI-licensing.

Kiss (1998), on the basis of the language material from Hungarian and English, has claimed that information focus has no syntactic relevance and has no distinguished position in the sentence. This paper, however, shows that her claim may not hold in the languages such as Korean, which actively employs scrambling for the purposes of shifting information and prosodic structures in varying speech contexts. Languages of this type use scrambling (or syntactic detachments) to dislocate both the non-focal and the focal entities (which represent a topic and a contrastive constituent, respectively) away from their canonical positions. Scrambling, on the other hand, does not affect constituents bearing all-new information focus; they stay in-situ, and are typically anchored to the position immediately before the verb in the sentence. This observation is made on the basis of (i) relative degree of phonetic prominence of the two types of focus (Rochemont 1986, Pierrehumbert & Beckmann 1988, Kratzer & Selkirk 2007, etc.), and (ii) the default position occupied by the constituents bearing information focus from the viewpoint of information structure, which was first proposed by Vallduví 1992 and has been widely discussed in literature (Kiss 1998, Vallduví & Engdahl 1998, and Tomioka 2007, among many others).