Special Quantifiers: Higher-Order Quantification and Nominalization
Friederike Moltmann
May 2024 

Special quantifiers are quantifiers like something, everything, and several things. They are special both semantically and syntactically and play quite an important role in philosophy, in discussions of ontological commitment to abstract objects, of higher-order metaphysics, and of the apparent need for propositions. This paper will review and discuss in detail the syntactic and semantic peculiarities of special quantifiers and show that they are incompatible with substitutional and higher-order analyses that have recently been proposed. It instead defends and develops in formal detail a semantic analysis of special quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers. On this analysis, special quantifiers involve both singular objectual quantification and implicit non-singular (higher-order, plural, or mass) quantification. The analysis rests on a range of recent insights and proposals in generative syntactic theory, in particular the recognition of '–thing' as a light noun and a potential classifier as well as recent views of the decomposition of attitudinal and locutionary verbs in syntax

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008112 (please use that when you cite this article)
keywords:	substitution problem, special quantifiers, higher-order quantifiers, attitude verbs, intensional transitives, nominalizations, lexical decomposition, classifiers, semantics, syntax
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