Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Which quantificational forces do languages encode lexically?When a language features multiple quantificational scales(e.g. determiner and adverbial quantification), does the pat-tern of lexicalization of quantificational forces we discoverfor one scale correlate with those of other scales? We useEnglish as a first test case for examining these questions,adapting the basic ideas of Lewis (1975) into the hypothesisthat English lexical quantifiers unrelated to cardinal numbersor definite descriptions, determiner and adverbial alike, haveone of six quantificational forces. To begin to test this claimempirically, we elicited speaker interpretations of a range ofquantifiers in a web-based study. Dividing participants into anadverbial condition and a determiner condition, we gave acontext specifying a 100-day period and asked participants tojudge the quantificational force of quantified sentences denot-ing an individual’s daily activities during this period. Wefound evidence of cross-scale correspondences but fewerquantificational forces than expected. These results providepreliminary evidence for parts of our hypothesis but suggest aneed for future research that covers more lexical items, lan-guages, and quantificational scales.