The restrictive potential of weak adjuncts: nominal as-phrases and individual quantifiers

Abstract

Starting from the observation that weak adjuncts can be interpreted as restricting co-occurring temporal and modal quantifiers, I show by the example of non-clausal, structurally high nominal as-phrases (e.g., as a child) that they are never understood as restricting individual quantifiers with which they associate. At first glance, this is surprising since the compositional ingredients seem to parallel the temporal and modal cases. I account for this contrast by showing that the structural configuration between as-phrases and individual quantifiers, as well as the semantic dependency between those two parts differs in crucial respects from those in the temporal and modal cases. Lastly, I propose an analysis for sentences containing as-phrases that associate with individual quantifiers which is based on the assumption that as-phrases and their associated constituents are connected via Non-Obligatory Control, which I analyze via discourse anaphora.