This paper presents a procedure to generate judgment determiners, e.g., many, few. Although such determiners carry very little objective information, they are extensively used in everyday language. The paper presents a precise characterization of a class of such determiners using three semantic tests. A conceptual representation for sets is then derived from this characterization which can serv...

This paper examines the status of so-called ‘pleonastic’ determiners, focusing on the plural definite generic common in Romance languages. It is noted that every language has generic or kind-denoting terms but such terms vary between bare and definite (rather than indefinite) forms across languages. Canonical and non-canonical uses of definite determiners are distinguished and language variatio...

One of the success stories in formal semantics is the analysis of NPs as generalized quantifiers, which can be traced back from Barwise & Cooper (1981) via Montague to Frege. The great attraction of this analysis is that it allows for a compositional analysis of the meaning of noun phrases that is consistent with independently motivated assumptions about their syntax. For example, Barwise and C...

Determiners play an important role in conveying the meaning of an utterance, but they have often been disregarded, perhaps because it seemed more i~portant to devise methods to grasp the global meaning of a sentence, even if not in a precise way. Another problem with determiners is their inherent a~bigulty. In this paper we propose a logical formaliem, which, among other things, is suitable fc~...

Most work on determiners has been concerned with purely semantic properties, the occurrence of particular determiners in certain syntactic environments such as existential-there sentences, determiners as heads of phrases (the DP hypothesis, Abney 1987) or quantifier scoping. One question that has not been extensively discussed in the literature is how the various English determiners order with ...

This article studies the monotonicity behavior of plural determiners that quantify over collections. Following previous work, we describe the collective interpretation of determiners such as all, some and most using generalized quantifiers of a higher type that are obtained systematically by applying a type shifting operator to the standard meanings of determiners in Generalized Quantifier Theo...

This paper examines the spontaneous productions of 3 normal and 11 French children with SLI, focussing on infinitives, subject and complement clitics, and determiners. The 3 normal children (1.8–2.10) appear to show roughly concomitant use of infinitives and omission of determiners or pronominal clitics. However, determiner omission and the use of infinitives are different in some respects. Mor...

Background & Aims: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case-markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case-markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of caseassigning constituents. Since verbs and verb inflections are case-assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presen...