Abstract
It is generally accepted that restrictive relative propositions, such as " [which are red] " in " les fruits [qui sont rouges] ", denote properties of individuals, which can be applied to an object and return true or false - in this analysis, " qui sont rouges " is synonymous with the adjective " rouges ". I'll show that this thesis is not true in all generality. Restrictive relatives can denote properties of generalized quantifiers. Consider the sentence " I've read the books I was supposed to ". It can describe a situation in which no specific book or set of books had the property of having to be read by me, but where I had to read, for example, a history book taken from a certain predetermined list, and two Russian novels also taken from a predetermined list, and where I fulfilled this obligation. In this example " that I had to read " does not denote a property that applies to a book if that book has to be read, because in the scenario described, no book has this property, and nevertheless " the books I had to read " does not produce a referential failure. I'll show that such a relative should be analyzed as denoting a property of second order, i.e. a property that applies to a generalized quantifier, and I'll relate this fact to already known facts concerning the interpretation of interrogative sentences. In particular, I'll show that " relative quantity " (" relative amount ") is a special case of these " higher-order relative ", and I'll discuss the syntactic restrictions that seem to apply to the distribution of these " higher-order relative " (including " relative amount ").
