Quantifiers

[Siva Kalyan]

I’m a bit confused. Surely in everyday conversation, we use the “domain-restricted” sense of all far more often than the “unrestricted” sense (because we usually talk about a bounded domain rather than the set of all things in the universe). I would have thought that this is the default interpretation of the universal quantifier in most languages, and that if a language is missing one of the senses, it would nearly always be the unrestricted one, which seems less useful. It seems like it would be more noteworthy if there were a language which has only the unrestricted quantifier.

Perhaps I’m missing something.

Siva  

--  
Siva Kalyan
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On Sunday, 24 July 2011 at 12:15 PM, Everett, Daniel wrote:

> Extremely useful, David!
>  
> Sent from my iPhone
>  
> On Jul 24, 2011, at 12:10 PM, "David Gil" <gil at eva.mpg.de (mailto: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 (mailto:gil at eva.mpg.de)
> > Webpage: http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

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