Quantifiers
Everett, Daniel
DEVERETT at BENTLEY.EDU
Sun Jul 24 16:15:36 UTC 2011
Extremely useful, David!
Sent from my iPhone
On Jul 24, 2011, at 12:10 PM, "David Gil" <gil at eva.mpg.de> wrote:
> 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/
>
>
More information about the Lingtyp
mailing list