Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction briefly discusses some of the issues that quantification raises in syntax, semantics, prosody, and psycholinguistics. It highlights the aspects of quantification that invite experimental testing: the ambiguity of quantificational constructions, the virtual movement rules assumed in their derivation, differences in children’s and adults’ grammars of quantification, competing semantic and pragmatic accounts of certain interpretations, etc. Psycholinguistic studies testing the role of language in mathematical cognition are also mentioned. The Introduction also summarizes each chapter, surveying the types of quantifiers analyzed, the languages involved, the theories tested and compared, and the experimental methods employed.