Quantifiers

[Everett, Daniel]

Siva,

But that IS all that most languages have, one that can be both unrestricted and restricted. And, because we tend to talk about what we know best, it will indeed be restricted by domain in most uses. However, not in all.

If a child says to their parent "But, Mom, *everyone* is going to the party!" and the mom replies "That is false, because you're not" , the parent has reminded the child of the main use (or alternative use if one prefers) of the quantifier.

If it isn't possible for a parent to use the quantifier in this way and the child's use is the only one possible, then the language, ceteris paribus, lacks unrestricted quantifiers. But this seems unlikely. And I suspect that this if for  the reasons that David Gil outlined.

-- Dan

On Jul 26, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Siva Kalyan wrote:

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
Sent with Sparrow<http://bit.ly/sigsprw>

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<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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