On the grammar and processing of proportional quantifiers: most versus more than half

Martin Hackl
2009 Natural Language Semantics  
Proportional quantifiers have played a central role in the development of formal semantics because they set a bench mark for the expressive power needed to describe quantification in natural language (Barwise&Cooper 1981). 'Most,' in particular, supplied the initial motivation for adopting Generalized Quantifier Theory because its meaning is definable as relation between sets of individuals, which are taken to be semantic primitives Generalized Quantifier Theory. This paper proposes an
more » ... ve analysis of 'most' that does not treat it as a lexical item whose meaning needs to be accessible without the help of compositional processes. Instead, proportional 'most' is analyzed as superlative of 'many ' (c.f. Bresnan 1973). Two types of empirical evidence are presented in support of this view, both exploit the fact that only a decompositional analysis of porporitonal quantifiers provides the means to generate different logical forms for seemingly equivalent statements of the form most A B and more than half of the A B.
doi:10.1007/s11050-008-9039-x fatcat:tqmoayqb4zcgnfemcaswrqaz74