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.