Abstract
One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.
Highlights
In a broad sense, natural language quantification includes expressions of explicit quantities or numerical proportions (e.g., 50%), as well as a set of expressions that do not directly refer to numbers but express quantities or proportions as more or less vague estimations thereof
We started with the question of whether it is possible to identify the different quantifiers’ numerical bounds and whether these are encoded in quantifier meanings or are epiphenomenal
We believe that the cross-linguistic perspective that we added to this study sheds light on the question of whether quantifier meanings can be given the status of a semantic universal (Determiner Universal, Barwise and Cooper, 1981)
Summary
Natural language quantification includes expressions of explicit quantities or numerical proportions (e.g., 50%), as well as a set of expressions that do not directly refer to numbers but express quantities or proportions as more or less vague estimations thereof. The standard approach in formal semantics that goes back to Barwise and Cooper’s (1981) seminal work, treats these determiners as relations between sets of individuals. In this framework, for instance, the determiner some, as in Some balloons are red, relates the set of balloons and the set of relevant red objects in a way which requires that the intersection of the two sets is not empty for the sentence to be True in a given situation.
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