April 2008, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 131-140,
Open Access
This content is freely available online to anyone, anywhere at any time.
Date:
30 Jan 2008
A Remark on Collective Quantification
- Juha Kontinen,
- Jakub Szymanik
- … show all 2 hide
Abstract
We consider collective quantification in natural language. For many years the common strategy in formalizing collective quantification has been to define the meanings of collective determiners, quantifying over collections, using certain type-shifting operations. These type-shifting operations, i.e., lifts, define the collective interpretations of determiners systematically from the standard meanings of quantifiers. All the lifts considered in the literature turn out to be definable in second-order logic. We argue that second-order definable quantifiers are probably not expressive enough to formalize all collective quantification in natural language.
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- Title
- A Remark on Collective Quantification
- Open Access
- Available under Open Access This content is freely available online to anyone, anywhere at any time.
- Journal
-
Journal of Logic, Language and Information
Volume 17, Issue 2 , pp 131-140
- Cover Date
- 2008-04-01
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10849-007-9055-0
- Print ISSN
- 0925-8531
- Online ISSN
- 1572-9583
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Keywords
-
- Collective quantification
- Lindström quantifiers
- Second-order generalized quantifiers
- Type-shifting
- Definability
- Computational complexity
- Authors
-
-
Juha Kontinen
(1)
-
Jakub Szymanik
(2)
(3)
-
Juha Kontinen
- Author Affiliations
-
- 1. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 68, 00014, Helsinki, Finland
- 2. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 3. Institute of Philosophy, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland