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Generalized Quantifiers
Edited by Jakub Szymanik (University of Amsterdam)
About this topic
| Summary | Generalized quantifier theory studies the semantics of quantifier expressions, like, `every’, `some’, `most’, ‘infinitely many’, `uncountably many’, etc. The classical version was developed in the 1980s, at the interface of linguistics, mathematics and philosophy. In logic generalized quantifier are often defined as classes of models closed on isomorphism (topic neutral). For instance, quantifier “infinitely many” may be defined as a class of all infinite models. Equivalently, in linguistics generalized quantifiers are formally treated as relations between subset of the universe. For instance, in sentence `Most of the students are smart”, quantifier `most’ is a binary relation between the set of students and the set of smart people. The sentence is true if and only if the cardinality of the set of smart students is greater than the cardinality of the set of students who are not smart. |
| Key works | Gottlob Frege was one of the major figures in forming the modern concept of quantification. In Begriffsschrift (1879) he made a distinction between bound and free variables and treated quantifiers as well-defined, denoting entities. However, historically speaking the notion of a generalized quantifier was formulated for the first time in a seminal paper of Andrzej Mostowski 1957, where the notions of existential and universal quantification were extended to the concept of a monadic generalized quantifier binding one variable in one formula, and later this was generalized to arbitrary types by Per Lindström 1966. Soon it was realized by Richard Montague 1970 that the notion can be used to model the denotations of noun phrases in natural language. Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper (1981) introduced the apparatus of generalized quantifiers as a standard semantic toolbox and started the rigorous study of their properties from the linguistic perspective. |
| Introductions | For an encyclopedia article see Westerståhl 2008. For a survey of classical results we recommend: Keenan & Westerstahl 1997. Peters & Westerståhl 2006 is a thorough handbook treatment focused on definability questions and their applications in model theory and linguistics. For more computer science results consult, e.g., Makowsky & Pnueli 1995 . For a psychological perspective, see, e.g. Moxey & Sanford 1993. For a combination of formal work and cognitive science perspective, see, e.g., Szymanik 2016. |
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Related
Siblings
- Plural Quantification (153)
- Quantification and Ontology (331)
- Quantifier Restriction (49)
- Unrestricted Quantification (69)
- Substitutional Quantification (60)
- Variables (55)
- Quantifiers, Misc (111)
See also
- Model Theory (6,331)
- Formal Semantics (398)
- Theory of Computation (1,055 | 119)
- Linguistic Universals (541)
Contents
440 found
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| 1 — 50 / 440 |
- Some proof theoretical remarks on quantification in ordinary language.Michele Abrusci & Christian Retoré - manuscriptThis paper surveys the common approach to quantification and generalised quantification in formal linguistics and philosophy of language. We point out how this general setting departs from empirical linguistic data, and give some hints for a different view based on proof theory, which on many aspects gets closer to the language itself. We stress the importance of Hilbert's oper- ator epsilon and tau for, respectively, existential and universal quantifications. Indeed, these operators help a lot to construct semantic representation close to (...)
- What is Logical in First-Order Logic?Boris Čulina - manuscriptIn this article, logical concepts are defined using the internal syntactic and semantic structure of language. For a first-order language, it has been shown that its logical constants are connectives and a certain type of quantifiers for which the universal and existential quantifiers form a functionally complete set of quantifiers. Neither equality nor cardinal quantifiers belong to the logical constants of a first-order language.
- Probability Semantics for Aristotelian Syllogisms.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - manuscriptWe present a coherence-based probability semantics for (categorical) Aristotelian syllogisms. For framing the Aristotelian syllogisms as probabilistic inferences, we interpret basic syllogistic sentence types A, E, I, O by suitable precise and imprecise conditional probability assessments. Then, we define validity of probabilistic inferences and probabilistic notions of the existential import which is required, for the validity of the syllogisms. Based on a generalization of de Finetti's fundamental theorem to conditional probability, we investigate the coherent probability propagation rules of argument forms (...)
- Propositions or choice functions: What do quantifiers quantify over.Klaus Abels & Luiza Martí - forthcoming - Natural Language Semantics.
- Giving Generic Language Another Thought.Eleonore Neufeld, Annie Bosse, Guillermo Del Pinal & Rachel Sterken - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science.According to an influential research program in cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, there is a deep, special connection between generics and pernicious aspects of social cognition such as stereotyping. Specifically, generics are thought to exacerbate our propensity to essentialize, lead us to overgeneralize based on scarce evidence, and lead to other epistemically dubious patterns of inference. Recently, however, several studies have put empirical and theoretical pressure on some of the main tenets of this research program. The goal of this paper (...)
- Learnability and Semantic Universals.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & Jakub Szymanik - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of learning that can (...)
- Generics and Quantified Generalizations: Asymmetry Effects and Strategic Communicators.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - 2025 - Cognition 256 (C):106004.Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and developmentally early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work suggests that generics display a unique asymmetry between the prevalence levels required to accept them and the prevalence levels typically implied by their use. This asymmetry effect is thought to have serious social consequences: if speakers use socially problematic generics based on prevalence levels that are systematically lower than what is typically inferred by their recipients, then using generics will (...)
- Update rules and semantic universals.Luca Incurvati & Giorgio Sbardolini - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (2):259-289.We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...)
- Reference to singular kinds in Germanic and Romance.Samuel Jambrović - 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) "down" operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia (...)
- Experimenting with every American king.Poppy Mankowitz - 2023 - Natural Language Semantics 31 (4):349-387.The standard contemporary semantics for ‘every’ predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as ‘Every American king lives in New York’. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued, and they are apparently more likely to do so when such sentences include determiners like ‘every’ as opposed to those like ‘no’. Empirical investigation of (...)
- Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - 2023 - Proceedings of the 45Th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45:1-6.Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...)
- Nothing, Everything, Something!Achille C. Varzi - 2022 - In Fosca Mariani-Zini (ed.), The Meaning of Something: Rethinking the Logic and the Unity of Metaphysics. Springer.Universalist and nihilist answers to philosophical questions may be extreme, but they are clear enough. Aliquidist answers, by contrast, are typically caught between the Scylla of vagueness and indeterminacy and the Charybdis of ungroundedness and arbitrariness, and steering a proper middle course—saying exactly where in the middle one is going to settle—demands exceptional navigating powers. I myself tend to favor extreme answers precisely for this reason. Here, however, I consider one sense in which Something may claim superiority over its polar (...)
- ‘Quantifier Variance’ Is Not Quantifier Variance.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (3):611-627.ABSTRACT There has been recent interest in the idea that, when metaphysicians disagree over the truth of (say) ‘There are numbers’ or ‘Chairs exist’, their dispute is merely verbal. This idea has been taken to motivate quantifier variance, the view that the meanings of quantifier expressions vary across different ontological languages, and that each of these meanings is of equal metaphysical merit. I argue that quantifier variance cannot be upheld in light of natural language theorists’ analyses of quantifier expressions. The (...)
- The modality and non-extensionality of the quantifiers.Arnold Koslow - 2019 - Synthese 196 (7):2545-2554.We shall try to defend two non-standard views that run counter to two well-entrenched familiar views. The standard views are the universal and existential quantifiers of first-order logic are not modal operators, and the quantifiers are extensional. If that is correct then the counterclaims create genuine problems for some traditional philosophical doctrines.
- Truth and Generalized Quantification.Bruno Whittle - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):340-353.Kripke [1975] gives a formal theory of truth based on Kleene's strong evaluation scheme. It is probably the most important and influential that has yet been given—at least since Tarski. However, it has been argued that this theory has a problem with generalized quantifiers such as All—that is, All ϕs are ψ—or Most. Specifically, it has been argued that such quantifiers preclude the existence of just the sort of language that Kripke aims to deliver—one that contains its own truth predicate. (...)
- Ryle, the Double Counting Problem, and the Logical Form of Category Mistakes.Jonah Goldwater - 2018 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (2):337-359.Gilbert Ryle is most famous for accusing the Cartesian dualist of committing a category mistake. Yet the nature of this accusation, and the idea of a category mistake more generally, remains woefully misunderstood. The aim of this paper is to rectify this misunderstanding. I show that Ryle does not conceive of category mistakes as mistakes of predication, as is so widely believed. Instead I show category mistakes are mistakes of conjunction and quantification. This thesis uniquely unifies and explains the wide (...)
- Probabilistic semantics for categorical syllogisms of Figure II.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - 2018 - In D. Ciucci, G. Pasi & B. Vantaggi (eds.), Scalable Uncertainty Management. pp. 196-211.A coherence-based probability semantics for categorical syllogisms of Figure I, which have transitive structures, has been proposed recently (Gilio, Pfeifer, & Sanfilippo [15]). We extend this work by studying Figure II under coherence. Camestres is an example of a Figure II syllogism: from Every P is M and No S is M infer No S is P. We interpret these sentences by suitable conditional probability assessments. Since the probabilistic inference of ~????|???? from the premise set {????|????, ~????|????} is not informative, (...)
- At least not false, at most possible: between truth and assertibility of superlative quantifiers.Maria Spychalska - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):571-602.Generalized Quantifier Theory defines superlative quantifiers at most n and at least n as truth-conditionally equivalent to comparative quantifiers fewer than n+1 and more than n \1. It has been demonstrated, however, that this standard theory cannot account for various linguistic differences between these two types of quantifiers. In this paper I discuss how the distinction between assertibility and truth-conditions can be applied to explain this phenomenon. I draw a parallel between the assertibility of disjunctions and superlative quantifiers, and argue (...)
- Illusory inferences with quantifiers.Salvador Mascarenhas & Philipp Koralus - 2017 - Thinking and Reasoning 23 (1):33-48.The psychological study of reasoning with quantifiers has predominantly focused on inference patterns studied by Aristotle about two millennia ago. Modern logic has shown a wealth of inference patterns involving quantifiers that are far beyond the expressive power of Aristotelian syllogisms, and whose psychology should be explored. We bring to light a novel class of fallacious inference patterns, some of which are so attractive that they are tantamount to cognitive illusions. In tandem with recent insights from linguistics that quantifiers like (...)
- Probabilistic squares and hexagons of opposition under coherence.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - 2017 - International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 88:282-294.Various semantics for studying the square of opposition and the hexagon of opposition have been proposed recently. We interpret sentences by imprecise (set-valued) probability assessments on a finite sequence of conditional events. We introduce the acceptability of a sentence within coherence-based probability theory. We analyze the relations of the square and of the hexagon in terms of acceptability. Then, we show how to construct probabilistic versions of the square and of the hexagon of opposition by forming suitable tripartitions of the (...)
- Square of opposition under coherence.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - 2017 - In M. B. Ferraro, P. Giordani, B. Vantaggi, M. Gagolewski, P. Grzegorzewski, O. Hryniewicz & María Ángeles Gil (eds.), Soft Methods for Data Science. pp. 407-414.Various semantics for studying the square of opposition have been proposed recently. So far, only [14] studied a probabilistic version of the square where the sentences were interpreted by (negated) defaults. We extend this work by interpreting sentences by imprecise (set-valued) probability assessments on a sequence of conditional events. We introduce the acceptability of a sentence within coherence-based probability theory. We analyze the relations of the square in terms of acceptability and show how to construct probabilistic versions of the square (...)
- Vagueness and Quantification.Andrea Iacona - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 45 (5):579-602.This paper deals with the question of what it is for a quantifier expression to be vague. First it draws a distinction between two senses in which quantifier expressions may be said to be vague, and provides an account of the distinction which rests on independently grounded assumptions. Then it suggests that, if some further assumptions are granted, the difference between the two senses considered can be represented at the formal level. Finally, it outlines some implications of the account provided (...)
- Some Properties of Iterated Languages.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - 2016 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (2):191-213.A special kind of substitution on languages called iteration is presented and studied. These languages arise in the application of semantic automata to iterations of generalized quantifiers. We show that each of the star-free, regular, and deterministic context-free languages are closed under iteration and that it is decidable whether a given regular or determinstic context-free language is an iteration of two such languages. This result can be read as saying that the van Benthem/Keenan ‘Frege Boundary’ is decidable for large subclasses (...)
- Quantifiers and Cognition: Logical and Computational Perspectives.Jakub Szymanik - 2016 - Springer.This volume on the semantic complexity of natural language explores the question why some sentences are more difficult than others. While doing so, it lays the groundwork for extending semantic theory with computational and cognitive aspects by combining linguistics and logic with computations and cognition. -/- Quantifier expressions occur whenever we describe the world and communicate about it. Generalized quantifier theory is therefore one of the basic tools of linguistics today, studying the possible meanings and the inferential power of quantifier (...)
- Life on the Range.G. Aldo Antonelli - 2015 - In Alessandro Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373). Springer. pp. 171-189.
- Quantification and Logical Form.Andrea Iacona - 2015 - In Alessandro Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373). Springer. pp. 125-140.This paper deals with the logical form of quantified sentences. Its purpose is to elucidate one plausible sense in which quantified sentences can adequately be represented in the language of first-order logic. Section 1 introduces some basic notions drawn from general quantification theory. Section 2 outlines a crucial assumption, namely, that logical form is a matter of truth-conditions. Section 3 shows how the truth-conditions of quantified sentences can be represented in the language of first-order logic consistently with some established undefinability (...)
- A solution to the donkey sentence problem.Adam Morton - 2015 - Analysis 75 (4):554-557.The problem concerns quantifiers that seem to hover between universal and existential readings. I argue that they are neither, but a different quantifier that has features of each. NOTE the published paper has a mistake. I have corrected this in the version on this site. A correction note will appear in Analysis.
- Introduction.Alessandro Torza - 2015 - In Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373). Springer. pp. 1-15.This introductory chapter provides a summary of the contributions to the volume, as well as some critical remarks.
- Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373).Alessandro Torza (ed.) - 2015 - Springer.This volume covers a wide range of topics that fall under the 'philosophy of quantifiers', a philosophy that spans across multiple areas such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and even the history of philosophy. It discusses the import of quantifier variance in the model theory of mathematics. It advances an argument for the uniqueness of quantifier meaning in terms of Evert Beth’s notion of implicit definition, and clarifies the oldest explicit formulation of quantifier variance: the one proposed by Rudolf Carnap. -/- (...)
- No more shall we part: Quantifiers in English comparatives.Peter Alrenga & Christopher Kennedy - 2014 - Natural Language Semantics 22 (1):1-53.It is well known that the interpretation of quantificational expressions in the comparative clause poses a serious challenge for semantic analyses of the English comparative. In this paper, we develop a new analysis of the comparative clause designed to meet this challenge, in which a silent occurrence of the negative degree quantifier no interacts with other quantificational expressions to derive the observed range of interpretations. Although our analysis incorporates ideas from previous analyses, we show that it is able to account (...)
- Bare Quantifiers?Hanoch Ben-Yami - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (2):175-188.In a series of publications I have claimed that by contrast to standard formal languages, quantifiers in natural language combine with a general term to form a quantified argument, in which the general term's role is to determine the domain or plurality over which the quantifier ranges. In a recent paper Zoltán Gendler Szabó tried to provide a counterexample to this analysis and derived from it various conclusions concerning quantification in natural language, claiming it is often ‘bare’. I show that (...)
- Superlative quantifiers and meta-speech acts.Ariel Cohen & Manfred Krifka - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (1):41-90.Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don’t promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech (...)
- Extensionality in natural language quantification: the case of many and few.Kristen A. Greer - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (4):315-351.This paper presents an extensional account of manyand few that explains data that have previously motivated intensional analyses of these quantifiers :599–620, 2000). The key insight is that their semantic arguments are themselves set intersections: the restrictor is the intersection of the predicates denoted by the N’ or the V’ and the restricted universe, U, and the scope is the intersection of the N’ and V’. Following Cohen, I assume that the universe consists of the union of alternatives to the (...)
- On the general interpretation of first-order quantifiers.G. Aldo Antonelli - 2013 - Review of Symbolic Logic 6 (4):637-658.While second-order quantifiers have long been known to admit nonstandard, or interpretations, first-order quantifiers (when properly viewed as predicates of predicates) also allow a kind of interpretation that does not presuppose the full power-set of that interpretationgeneral” interpretations for (unary) first-order quantifiers in a general setting, emphasizing the effects of imposing various further constraints that the interpretation is to satisfy.
- Are Quantifier Phrases Always Quantificational? The Case of 'Every F'.Pierre Baumann - 2013 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 20 (2):143-172.This paper argues that English quantifier phrases of the form ‘every F’ admit of a literal referential interpretation, contrary to the standard semantic account of this expression, according to which it denotes a set and a second-order relation. Various arguments are offered in favor of the referential interpretation, and two likely objections to it are forestalled.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Complexity and expressive power of second‐order extended Horn logic.Shiguang Feng & Xishun Zhao - 2013 - Mathematical Logic Quarterly 59 (1-2):4-11.We introduce SO-HORNr which is a revised version of SO-HORN and show that SO-HORNr captures equation image on ordered finite structures. We also introduce second-order extended Horn logic SO-EHORN and a superclass SO-EHORNr of it. We show that both of them capture equation image on ordered finite structures by proving that SO-EHORN and SO-EHORNr have the same expressive power when only consider ordered structures.
- Modal Ontology and Generalized Quantifiers.Peter Fritz - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 42 (4):643-678.Timothy Williamson has argued that in the debate on modal ontology, the familiar distinction between actualism and possibilism should be replaced by a distinction between positions he calls contingentism and necessitism. He has also argued in favor of necessitism, using results on quantified modal logic with plurally interpreted second-order quantifiers showing that necessitists can draw distinctions contingentists cannot draw. Some of these results are similar to well-known results on the relative expressivity of quantified modal logics with so-called inner and outer (...)
- On contextual domain restriction in categorial grammar.Erich H. Rast - 2013 - Synthese 190 (12):2085-2115.Abstract -/- Quantifier domain restriction (QDR) and two versions of nominal restriction (NR) are implemented as restrictions that depend on a previously introduced interpreter and interpretation time in a two-dimensional semantic framework on the basis of simple type theory and categorial grammar. Against Stanley (2002) it is argued that a suitable version of QDR can deal with superlatives like tallest. However, it is shown that NR is needed to account for utterances when the speaker intends to convey different restrictions for (...)
- Iterating semantic automata.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & I. I. I. Thomas F. Icard - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (2):151-173.The semantic automata framework, developed originally in the 1980s, provides computational interpretations of generalized quantifiers. While recent experimental results have associated structural features of these automata with neuroanatomical demands in processing sentences with quantifiers, the theoretical framework has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, after presenting some classic results on semantic automata in a modern style, we present the first application of semantic automata to polyadic quantification, exhibiting automata for iterated quantifiers. We also discuss the role of semantic automata in (...)
- Response to Westerstahl.Hanoch Ben-Yami - 2012 - Logique Et Analyse 55 (217):47-55.
- Orthoposets with quantifiers.Janis Cırulis - 2012 - Bulletin of the Section of Logic 41 (1/2):1-12.
- The Square of Opposition and Generalized Quantifiers.Duilio D'Alfonso - 2012 - In Jean-Yves Béziau & Dale Jacquette (eds.), Around and Beyond the Square of Opposition. New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 219--227.In this paper I propose a set-theoretical interpretation of the logical square of opposition, in the perspective opened by generalized quantifier theory. Generalized quantifiers allow us to account for the semantics of quantificational Noun Phrases, and of other natural language expressions, in a coherent and uniform way. I suggest that in the analysis of the meaning of Noun Phrases and Determiners the square of opposition may help representing some semantic features responsible to different logical properties of these expressions. I will (...)
- Generalized Quantifiers in Dependence Logic.Fredrik Engström - 2012 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21 (3):299-324.We introduce generalized quantifiers, as defined in Tarskian semantics by Mostowski and Lindström, in logics whose semantics is based on teams instead of assignments, e.g., IF-logic and Dependence logic. Both the monotone and the non-monotone case is considered. It is argued that to handle quantifier scope dependencies of generalized quantifiers in a satisfying way the dependence atom in Dependence logic is not well suited and that the multivalued dependence atom is a better choice. This atom is in fact definably equivalent (...)
- Generalized Stieltjes functions and their exact order.D. Karp & E. Prilepkina - 2012 - Journal of Classical Analysis 1 (1).
- (1 other version)Teória kvantifikácie a binárne predikáty.Miloš Kosterec - 2012 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 19 (3):388-402.The paper deals with a problem in formal theory of quan tification. Firstly, by way of examples, I introduce important parts of the theory. Using type analysis, I present a problem which stems from inadequacy of a rule concerning semantic interpretation of sentences involving n-ary predicates and quantifiers. I propose four distinct principles for specific types of sentences. They are generalized into a general semantic rule, which is, finally, applied to particular examples.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- On vectorizations of unary generalized quantifiers.Kerkko Luosto - 2012 - Archive for Mathematical Logic 51 (3):241-255.Vectorization of a class of structures is a natural notion in finite model theory. Roughly speaking, vectorizations allow tuples to be treated similarly to elements of structures. The importance of vectorizations is highlighted by the fact that if the complexity class PTIME corresponds to a logic with reasonable syntax, then it corresponds to a logic generated via vectorizations by a single generalized quantifier (Dawar in J Log Comput 5(2):213–226, 1995). It is somewhat surprising, then, that there have been few systematic (...)
- Semantic bounds for everyday language.Marcin Mostowski & Jakub Szymanik - 2012 - Semiotica 2012 (188):363-372.We consider the notion of everyday language. We claim that everyday language is semantically bounded by the properties expressible in the existential fragment of second–order logic. Two arguments for this thesis are formulated. Firstly, we show that so–called Barwise's test of negation normality works properly only when assuming our main thesis. Secondly, we discuss the argument from practical computability for finite universes. Everyday language sentences are directly or indirectly verifiable. We show that in both cases they are bounded by second–order (...)
- Pragmatic identification of the witness sets.Livio Robaldo & Jakub Szymanik - 2012 - Proceeding of the 8th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.Among the readings available for NL sentences, those where two or more sets of entities are independent of one another are particularly challenging from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Those readings are termed here as ‘Independent Set (IS) readings'. Standard examples of such readings are the well-known Collective and Cumulative Readings. (Robaldo, 2011) proposes a logical framework that can properly represent the meaning of IS readings in terms of a set-Skolemization of the witness sets. One of (...)
- Relational domains and the interpretation of reciprocals.Sivan Sabato & Yoad Winter - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (3):191-241.We argue that a comprehensive theory of reciprocals must rely on a general taxonomy of restrictions on the interpretation of relational expressions. Developing such a taxonomy, we propose a new principle for interpreting reciprocals that relies on the interpretation of the relation in their scope. This principle, the Maximal Interpretation Hypothesis (MIH), analyzes reciprocals as partial polyadic quantifiers. According to the MIH, the partial quantifier denoted by a reciprocal requires the relational expression REL in its scope to denote a maximal (...)
- Explaining Quantifier Restriction: Reply to Ben-Yami.Dag Westerståhl - 2012 - Logique Et Analyse 55 (217):109-120.This is a reply to H. Ben-Yami, 'Generalized quantifiers, and beyond' (this journal, 2009), where he argues that standard GQ theory does not explain why natural language quantifiers have a restricted domain of quantification. I argue, on the other hand, that although GQ theory gives no deep explanation of this fact, it does give a sort of explanation, whereas Ben-Yami's suggested alternative is no improvement.
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