Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Standard and Non-Standard Quantifiers in Natural Language
By Edward L. Keenan
Since the early 1980s we have been witnessing an explosive growth in our knowledge of natural language quantifiers, specifically of their denotations as opposed to their form, distribution, or compositional interpretation. Our concern here is to unify and extend these results, highlighting generalizations of linguistic interest. We present first an inventory of semantically defined classes of quantifiers expressible in English, and then a list of linguistic generalizations stated in terms of these classes and their defining concepts. We close with two types of quantification that lie outside these classes and which invite further research as less is known about them.
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 03:03 BST
