Generalized quantifiers and inferences

Serge Lapierre

pp. 41-55

in: Mathieu Marion, Robert S. Cohen (eds), Québec studies in the philosophy of science, part I, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

The semantic treatment of noun phrases and determiners in Montague (1973) presupposes the notion of "generalized quantifiers' proposed in Mostowski (1957). The importance of this notion for natural language has been brought out explicitly in Barwise and Cooper (1981) and Keenan and Stavi (1986). The basic idea is to let a noun phrase DA (all men, some women, most students, etc.) to denote a set of sets of individuals, that is to say, the set of the denotations of the verb phrases B for which (DA)B holds.