Quantifiers

[David Gil]

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/