What the Partitive Reading of Floating Quantifiers in Korean Tells Us about the Korean Extended DP Structure

Abstract

This paper aims to present a DP structure of Korean, based on Korean Floating Quantifiers (FQ). As pointed out by Park (2008), among many others, there are various types of FQ constructions in Korean, which have already received much attention. Based on previous studies, such as Schwarzschild (2006) and Park (2008), this paper tries to analyze the following two points, which we believe have not been discussed in detail. First, some measure phrases (MPs) can also appear in FQ constructions, but other MPs cannot, and second, only some types of FQ constructions can receive the partitive interpretation. This paper shows that the distribution of MPs is closely related to Schwarzschild’s (2006) monotonicity constraint on MPs, and analyzes the distribution as well as the interpretation of MPs and classifier phrases in FQ constructions in parallel with Schwarzschild (2006) and Park (2008).