• Language and Information
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2002

This paper examines existing approaches to exceptive constructions, which typically serve to maintain the use of universal quantifiers by diminishing the domain quantified over. It places a particular focus on constructions involving Korean oyey, Dutch behalve, and English apart from, other than, and aside from. These lexical items all share an interesting semantic property that they mean either 'except' or 'besides' depending upon their linguistic contexts, but they have largely been ignored in the literature of exceptive constructions. An observation is made that the two meanings of the ambiguous exceptive words are in complementary distribution with respect to types of quantifiers and that they are not an isolated fact. Based on this, a unifying formal semantic analysis is attempted for the constructions.