A linguistic account of quantifiers in English and their place in the development of some modern approaches to syntax and semantics

Abstract

From Introduction: I should make it clear from the outset that I have no intention of trying to construct a calculus for the quantificational system of English as a natural language. My interests are purely linguistic with special emphasis on that part of the discipline traditionally known as semantics. Thus, although I offer a miniature survey of the development of quantificational studies in Philosophy in Chapter One, and have frequent recourse, in other charters, to observations made by philosophers, especially Quine, I make no attempt whatever to emulate the logicians by constructing such things as rules of inference. I have also tried to avoid symbolic representations except in those cases in which they show up aspects of semantic structure very clearly, and where I have symbolised, I have alternated between the systems of Quine and Peano-Russell, selection in each instance being determined by judgements regarding clarity.