Abstract
Natural language quantifiers often seem implicitly restricted. Thus when we say ‘The burglar took everything’, we have the feeling that ‘everything’ ranges over the domain of valuable objects in the house—not everything in the world. (In this case, it can be argued that there has to be some contextual restriction or other, for a totally unrestricted notion of ‘everything in the world’ hardly makes sense.) In the same way, someone who says ‘Most students came to the party’ is likely to have a particular group of students in mind, such that most students in that group came to the party.
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Recanati, F. (1998). Contextual Domains. In: Arrazola, X., Korta, K., Pelletier, F.J. (eds) Discourse, Interaction and Communication. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8994-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8994-9_2
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