Fwd: Quantifiers

[Daniel Everett]

Dick and all,

Because David posted this to a public forum, I will forward it on to Funknet - because I asked the same question to both Funknet and LingTyp.

Note that I am completely aware that quantifiers may take the kinds of restricted readings that I mentioned in the original query. What I was inquiring about was exactly what David responded with - lexical distinctions.

All the best,

Dan

> From: David Gil <gil at eva.mpg.de>
> Date: July 24, 2011 12:10:12 PM EDT
> To: "Everett, Daniel" <DEVERETT at bentley.edu>
> Cc: "LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG" <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
> Subject: Re: Quantifiers
> 
> Not quite what you're asking for, Dan, but Turkish has two universal 
> quantifiers, "bütün" and "hepsi", whose usage corresponds roughly to 
> what you're calling "unrestricted" and "domain-restricted" respectively.
> 
> In fact, if you add the feature of distributivity into the mix, you get 
> a similar (though perhaps not identical) semantic contrast in English, 
> between "every" and "each".
> 
> One might predict the absence of languages with "domain-restricted" but 
> no "unrestricted" universal quantifiers on the basis of general 
> principles of markedness:  if "domain-restricted" quantifiers involve 
> the presence of an additional feature, then one would expect them to 
> occur only in the presence of their unmarked counterparts lacking said 
> feature.
> 
> I wrote about this some time back, in
> 
> Gil, David (1991) "Universal Quantifiers: A Typological Study", EUROTYP 
> Working Papers, Series 7, Number 12, The European Science Foundation, 
> EUROTYP Programme, Berlin.
> 
> 
>> Imagine two quantifiers. One can be used to mean "all" in the sense of 
>> "all men (that anyone could ever imagine)." The other can only be used 
>> in the sense of "all (those we recognize in our culture/those in the 
>> next village over/those in the immediate context of discourse/etc)." 
>> 
>> Call the first one "unrestricted." Call the second one 
>> "domain-restricted." 
>> 
>> Is any language known that has only the latter? For semanticists, 
>> would there be any principle barring the existence of only the 
>> restricted type (whose domain is a subset of the former's) in the 
>> absence of the unrestricted?
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> 
>> **********************
>> Daniel L. Everett
>> 
>> http://daneverettbooks.com
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Gil
> 
> Department of Linguistics
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
> 
> Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
> Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
> Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/
> 
>