Floating Quantifiers, Partitives and Distributivity

Abstract

Commonly, the quantifier expressions of natural language are arguments of the verb, such as subjects, direct objects or objects of prepositions. In this respect, they differ crucially from the free-standing quantifier prefixes of first-order logic, as has often been observed by the proponents of generalized quantifier theory (Barwise and Cooper (1981)). This theory treats quantifiers such as every student or most teachers on a par with prototypical argument expressions such as proper names and pronouns (following Montague's (1973) innovation to employ 'lifted' types ,t> for proper names and other referring terms). At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that nominal arguments are not the only elements with quantificational force and in some languages not even the most frequent or central ones. Thus, there are adverbs of quantification, such as e.g. often in (1a) below (see Lewis (1975) and De Swart (1991) for discussion). Quantifiers may also be (pro-) nominal expressions used as modifiers, such as all in sentence (1b) and none of them in sentence (1c).

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