Quantifiers canonically
attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or
number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been
observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun
phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing
syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear
to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a
noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they
exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase
structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this
paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely
by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a
focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic
expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva’s (2011) recent
proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and
information structure features of FQs within LFG’s projection
architecture.