Strategies of Quantification
Kook-Hee Gil, Stephen Harlow, and George Tsoulas
Abstract
Quantification has been at the heart of research in the syntax and semantics of natural language since Aristotle. The last few decades have seen an explosion of detailed studies of the syntax and semantics of quantification and its relation to the rest of the theory of grammar. The result of these efforts was a highly sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of quantification. At the same time it opened the door to comparative studies that shed light in the ways that natural languages vary with respect to their realization of quantificational notions. The work in this book addresses preci ... More
Quantification has been at the heart of research in the syntax and semantics of natural language since Aristotle. The last few decades have seen an explosion of detailed studies of the syntax and semantics of quantification and its relation to the rest of the theory of grammar. The result of these efforts was a highly sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of quantification. At the same time it opened the door to comparative studies that shed light in the ways that natural languages vary with respect to their realization of quantificational notions. The work in this book addresses precisely these problems in a variety of languages (English, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Hausa, and others) and goes further in linking the variation in the expression of quantification to the notions of polarity sensitivity, free choice, and indefiniteness. The result is a broad picture of some fundamental parameters of variation.
Keywords:
quantifiers,
quantification,
indefinites,
plural syntax,
semantics syntax,
semantics interface,
polarity sensitivity,
free choice,
focus,
distributivity,
scope
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199692439 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692439.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Kook-Hee Gil, editor
University of Sheffield
Stephen Harlow, editor
George Tsoulas, editor
University of York
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