Strategies of Quantification

Abstract Quantification has been at the heart of research in the syntax and semantics of natural language since Aristotle. The last few decades have seen an explosion of detailed studies of the syntax and semantics of quantification and its relation to the rest of the theory of grammar. The result of these efforts was a highly sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of quantification. At the same time it opened the door to comparative studies that shed light in the ways that natural languages vary with respect to their realization of quantificational notions. The work in this book addresses precisely these problems in a variety of languages (English, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Hausa, and others) and goes further in linking the variation in the expression of quantification to the notions of polarity sensitivity, free choice, and indefiniteness. The result is a broad picture of some fundamental parameters of variation.