Earticle

The studies to a distributive meaning have usually explained it in terms of different respects and each approach is distinguished from others. For example, Lakoff(1972) tried to interpret it in terms of a movement rule, Link(1983, 1987) in terms of a distributive operator of predication, Scha(1981) in terms of a meaning postulate, Roberts(1987) in terms of a lambda operator, Choe(1987) in terms of an anti-quantifier, and so on. But any attempt to unify such diverse approaches has not made until now. This paper aims to examine the examples of distributive meaning, to review the selected approaches to it and to propose an alternative with which all the examples of distributive meaning can be explained uniformly. To do this, the distributive meaning is defined as a distributive relation, which consists of a distributive key and a distributive share in terms of a distributive trigger instead of a distributive assigner. (Chungbuk National University)