German measurement structures: case-marking and non-conservativity

Abstract

This paper addresses the syntactic and semantic analysis of nominal measurement structures like two liters of black coffee in German. German allows the case-marking on the substance noun phrase black coffee to vary: it can appear in genitive case or in the same case as the measure noun liter. The choice of case lacks semantic import with absolute measures like liter, but a semantic distinction does arise for proportional measures like percent, with the interpretation in the case-matching configuration serving as a prima facie counterexample to Keenan and Stavi’s Conservativity Hypothesis of DP quantification. We argue that (i) measurement structures do not have different syntactic configurations depending on the choice of measure noun (e.g., liter vs. percent); (ii) genitive and case-matching structures do, however, have different syntactic configurations; (iii) the semantic contrast between absolute and proportional measure nouns can be traced to their lexical interpretations; and (iv) the apparent violation of the Conservativity Hypothesis is only a surface-level phenomenon, and at LF all DP quantification is conservative.