Children's interpretations of general quantifiers, specific quantifiers and generics

Children's interpretations of general quantifiers, specific quantifiers, and generics.

Recently, several scholars have hypothesized that generics are a default mode of generalization, and thus that young children may at first treat quantifiers as if they were generic in meaning. To address this issue, the present experiment provides the first in-depth, controlled examination of the interpretation of generics compared to both general quantifiers ("all Xs", "some Xs") and specific ...

Quantifiers ∗

Quantifiers are terms of generality. They are also among our prime examples of operators which take scope. The distinction between singular and general terms, as well as the ways that general terms enter into scope relations, are certainly fundamental to our understanding of language. Yet when we turn to natural language, we encounter a huge and apparently messy collection of general terms; not...

Counting on Quantifiers: Specific Links between Linguistic Quantifiers and Number Acquisition

Knowledge of linguistic quantifiers (like all, many or some) correlates with number acquisition. However, it is unclear whether quantifier comprehension is exclusively related to exact number skills or whether the relationship also extends to approximate number skills. To find out, we tested German-speaking children on a quantifier comprehension task, two counting tasks (‘How-many task’, ‘Give-...

Weak Quantifiers

Generalized Quantifiers

We review recent work in the field of generalized quantifiers on finite models. We give an idea of the methods that are available in this area. Main emphasis is on definability issues, such as whether there is a logic for the PTIME properties of unordered finite models.