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.