Part-introducing 'percent' in English

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to a detailed empirical investigation of the distribution of percent in English, with an eye toward pushing our theoretical understanding of the phenomenon forward. Two uses of percent, called ‘conservative’ and ‘reversed’, have been observed. But the ‘reversed’ use is not the only one in which percent introduces a predicate that characterizes a part of a larger whole; there are also predicative ones, among others. The hunch on which the present investigation is based is that the predicative uses might form a natural class with the reversed uses. To get traction on this issue, I develop a catalog of cases in which percent combines directly with a predicate, on the basis of a corpus study. I then consider how existing theories fare in capturing its distribution, and offer two suggestions for improving the empirical coverage with a uniform treatment of the part-introducing uses. First, I propose a type- shift that converts a non-gradable predicate to a gradable one that tracks mereological parthood. This makes any non-gradable predicate eligible for use with a previous analysis of percent in constructions like 75% full. Second, motivated by cumulative-like readings, I sketch an analysis in a dynamic semantics with plurals in which percent applies to a cross-assignment sum, evaluated after the rest of the constraints in the clause have been applied to the discourse referent in question.