50% women in science as a step towards lauter Frauen in der Wissenschaft?
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
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| Citation | |
| Description | This paper discusses empirical parallels between German lauter, a peculiar expression that can mean ‘many’ and ‘only’ (Eckardt, 2002, 2006; Anderssen, 2011), and percentage expressions with bare nouns (%s) such as 50% women (Pasternak and Sauerland, 2022; Gehrke and Wągiel, 2022, 2023), both of which give rise to the unexpected non-conservative (NC) reading. We investigate speaker variation regarding lauter and compare it with ‘many’. We observe that it can only get the NC and the cardinality interpretations of ‘many’, i.e., it lacks the proportional reading. We argue that neither NC lauter nor %s show determiner-like behaviour and that they are both restricted to a VP-internal position and to HAVE-predicates. Finally, we speculate that NC effects might be responsible for fuelling the semantic change of lauter (with different effects in different varieties of German) and argue that the parallels between lauter and %s shed further doubt on the interplay of QR and focus as the source of NC construals. |
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