German measurement structures: case-marking and non-conservativity

Abstract This paper addresses the syntactic and semantic analysis of nominal measurement structures like two liters black coffee in German. German allows case-marking on substance noun phrase to vary: it can appear genitive case or same as measure liter . The choice lacks import with absolute measures , but a distinction does arise for proportional percent interpretation case-matching configuration serving prima facie counterexample Keenan Stavi’s Conservativity Hypothesis DP quantification. We argue that ( i ) do not have different configurations depending (e.g., vs. ); ii do, however, configurations; iii contrast between nouns be traced their lexical interpretations; iv apparent violation is only surface-level phenomenon, at LF all quantification conservative.