beating a retreat on exceptives

i’ve been emphasizing, including in this blog, that exceptives can only be licensed by universals. that’s what i believed until less than an hour ago. i now think that exceptives are licensed by members of a semantic class that corresponds to roberto zamparelli’s strong determiners (see his 1995 rochester dissertation). interestingly, membership in this class, as zamparelli pointed out, has a syntactic correlate, since strong determiners appear to occur in a DP shell that encompasses the phrase projected by the other class of determiners, predicative determiners. this is evidenced in the general possibility of cooccurrence of strong and predicative determiners, with the strong determiner always linearly preceding the predicative one in english. membership in the class seems to correspond to the acceptability of phrases like the following, with “Det” standing in for the determiner:

Det friend that i have

strong determiners are acceptable stand-ins for Det; predicative ones are not.

i’ll suggest that the following are strong determiners:

every
all
each
no
the five
the first n/the last n
the only n
the tallest
most
my five
any (including free choice any)

some of these, of course, are not a single determiner but a combination of a determiner and another determiner (five), superlative adjective (tallest, arguably most/least), or uniquely identifying adjective (only). also possible are combinations of three elements when the third is a cardinal, like the tallest three or the only five.

here are some predicative determiners:

some
a/an
five
many
few

notice how they fare with respect to licensing exceptives.

every/each president was protestant, except kennedy
all the presidents were protestant, except kennedy
no president was protestant, except kennedy
the forty-three presidents so far have been protestant, except kennedy
the first three/last three presidents were protestant, except kennedy
the only four presidents to have presided over the vietnam war were protestant, except kennedy
the tallest presidents have been protestant, except kennedy.
most of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders
my five rabbits are herbivorous, except fluffy.
i don’t eat any vegetables except kale (negative polarity any)
i would eat any vegetable except kale (free choice any)

the predicative determiners fare considerably worse.

*some presidents are protestant, except kennedy
*a president is protestant, except kennedy
*five presidents have been protestant, except kennedy
*many presidents have been protestant, except kennedy
*few presidents have been protestant, except kennedy

(i’m fudging a bit here; few and maybe many seem to fall in the same category as most:
few of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders
many of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders)

what about the “Det friend that i have” construction? here are the strong determiners

every friend that i have is a mensch
all the friends that i have are mensches
?each friend that i have is a mensch
no friend that i have is a mensch
the five friends that i have are mensches
the first three/the last friends that i’ve had were mensches
the only friend that i have is a mensch
the tallest friend that i have is a mensch
most friends that i have are mensches
*my five friends that i have are mensches
?don’t insult any friend that i have (negative polarity any)
any friend that i have is a mensch (free choice any)

a couple are somewhat odd, and “my five” is ungrammatical, presumably for the independent reason that “my N “ doesn’t combine well with restrictive relatives. as a whole, the class of strong determiners does well in this construction.

predicative determiners do less well:

*some friends that i have are mensches
*a friend that i have is a mensch
*five friends that i have are mensches
*many friends that i have are mensches
?few friends that i have are mensches

there's more to be said. but that's it for now.