A formal theory of intermediate quantifiers

Abstract

The paper provides a logical theory of a specific class of natural language expressions called intermediate quantifiers (most, a lot of, many, a few, a great deal of, a large part of, a small part of), which can be ranked among generalized quantifiers. The formal frame is the fuzzy type theory (FTT). Our main idea lays in the observation that intermediate quantifiers speak about elements taken from a class that is made “smaller” than the original universe in a specific way. Our theory is based on the formal theory of trichotomous evaluative linguistic expressions. Thus, an intermediate quantifier is obtained as a classical quantifier “for all” or “exists” but taken over a class of elements that is determined using an appropriate evaluative expression. In the paper we will characterize the behavior of intermediate quantifiers and prove many valid syllogisms that generalize classical Aristotle's ones.