Abstract

Most of the time our quantifications generalise over a restricted domain. Thus in the last sentence, ‘most of the time’ is arguably not a generalisation over all times in the history of the universe but is restricted to a sub-group of times, those at which humans exist and utter quantified phrases and sentences, say. Indeed the example illustrates the point that quantificational phrases often carry an explicit restriction with them: ‘some people’, ‘all dogs’. Even then, context usually restricts to a subdomain of the class specified by the count noun. Although teenagers like to have fun by being, they mistakenly think, overly literal— ‘Everyone is tired, let’s get to bed’: ‘everyone: you mean every person in the entire universe?’— competent language users have to be sensitive to context virtually all the time. But is it always the case that generalisation is over a restricted domain? On the face of it, to claim this is paradoxical. If we say.