Italian proportions and (non-)conservativity

Abstract

This paper describes the morpho-syntax and the interpretation of Italian proportional measure phrases (proportions), namely fractions and percentages. Ahn (2012) and Sauerland (2014) first observed that the restrictor and the predicate of these structures can be switched by minimal morpho-syntactic modifications (MIT hired sixty percent {of / of the} women) and identified quantifier floating for Korean and case for German as the morpho-syntactic markers of this reversal. Italian shows five novel morpho-syntactic markers: definiteness of the inner nominal, definiteness of the outer determiner, position with respect to the verb in main clauses, but not in subordinate clauses, and verb agreement. Also three interpretive factors are at play: the accessibility of the complement set, the type of predicate, and new information focus, whereas contrastive focus, playing a pivotal role in previous analyses, interacts with the restrictor/predicate reversal but is orthogonal to it. The discovered generalisations are only partially explained by current proposals and call for a new account.