Quantification in Natural Languages: 54 (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 54) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 079233129X ISBN 13: 9780792331292

Publisher: Springer, 1995

Synopsis

This volume of papers grew out of a research project on "Cross-Linguistic Quantification" originated by Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee in 1987 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 871999. The publication also reflects directly or indirectly several other related activ­ ities. Bach, Kratzer, and Partee organized a two-evening symposium on cross-linguistic quantification at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans (held without financial support) in order to bring the project to the attention of the linguistic community and solicit ideas and feedback from colleagues who might share our concern for developing a broader typological basis for research in semantics and a better integration of descriptive and theoretical work in the area of quantification in particular. The same trio organized a six-week workshop and open lecture series and related one-day confer­ ence on the same topic at the 1989 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by a supplementary grant, NSF grant BNS-8811250, and Partee offered a seminar on the same topic as part of the Institute course offerings. Eloise Jelinek, who served as a consultant on the principal grant and was a participant in the LSA symposium and the Arizona workshops, joined the group of editors for this volume in 1989.

About this title

Review

`We recommend unreservedly its careful and patient study to anyone with the slightest interest in the empirical facts and/or (their implications for) the formal properties of quantification.'
Linguistics, 34 (1996)

Synopsis

This extended collection of papers is the result of putting recent ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages. A central perspective of many of the papers follows the recognition of two broad types of quantificational strategies, one associated with nominal structures and determiners, the other with adverbial and other non-nominal expression ('D-quantifiers' and 'A-quantifiers').The papers demonstrate both the unity and the variety of natural language quantificational forms and meanings. Many of the papers also shed new light on questions of language typology and syntactic and morphological variation. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, Italian, American Sign Language, Hindi, and a number of languages of Australia, Greenland, and the Americas. These comparative studies provide initial data for a typology of quantificational structures in natural languages, with important implications for the study of universal grammar. The book consists of research papers aimed at linguists, philosophers, and psychologists interested in semantics and linguistic form.

An introduction presents a sketch of the background of this research and some of the central issues discussed, with pointers toward the included papers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 079233129X
• ISBN 13: 9780792331292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 769
• Editor: Bach Emmon, Jelinek E., Kratzer A., Partee Barbara B.H.