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delph-in / erg

English Resource Grammar
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"quite" is over-productive as a modifier of quantifers #7

Closed goodmami closed 5 years ago

goodmami commented 6 years ago

The following parse, as I'd expect:

I was surprised to find the following parse (they are ungrammatical for me, but maybe they are grammatical for others):

In addition "Quite some dogs bark." parses, which I don't like, but I'm fine with "Dogs barked for quite some time.", so maybe it's ok?

fcbond commented 6 years ago

I agree with Michael's grammatical judgements here/

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:17 AM, Michael Wayne Goodman < notifications@github.com> wrote:

The following parse, as I'd expect:

  • Quite a few dogs bark.
  • Quite many dogs bark.
  • Quite nearly all dogs bark.
  • Not quite all dogs bark.

I was surprised to find the following parse (they are ungrammatical for me, but maybe they are grammatical for others):

  • Quite all dogs bark.
  • Quite dogs bark.
  • Quite no dogs bark.

In addition "Quite some dogs bark." parses, which I don't like, but I'm fine with "Dogs barked for quite some time.", so maybe it's ok?

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danflick commented 5 years ago

I too agree about the judgments, but I think this is related to negative polarity, a phenomenon that the ERG does not yet handle well. See for example "I didn't have quite all the information" or "No one had quite all the facts" where the licensing negation shows up in a variety of forms. Likewise (from the web) "... even if you don't have quite every car type ...". So this is most likely another instance of a more general shortcoming of the ERG regarding negative polarity, but that is a hard problem that won't be solved soon. I'll add Mike's examples to the ones we would hope an account of negative polarity would handle someday, but close this issue since it's not a specific bug that can be fixed.