Tyler in NALS with MD crew

Determiners express restricted quantifiers and not relations between sets.

Fresh in Natural Language Semantics, "Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification" by alum and current UPenn postdoc Tyler Knowlton *21, together with a crew of Paul, Alexander, Jeff and, from Johns Hopkins, Justin Halberda. The paper reports a suite of studies suggesting that, when asked to evaluate sentences of the form every F is G, participants mentally group the Fs, but group neither the Gs nor the FGs (the Gs that are also Fs). Given this result, the paper argues that we do not understand every as it is represented in the currently standard semantics, as a relation between the Fs and either the Gs or the FGs. Rather we understand it as a unary quantifier over the Gs, restricted to the Fs. The complete abstract is below.

Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification

Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of every is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like every frog is green meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condition (e.g., being green). One important difference concerns how the determiner treats its two grammatical arguments. On the relational view, the arguments are on a logical par as independent terms that specify the two relata. But on the restricted view, the arguments play distinct logical roles: specifying the limited domain versus supplying an additional condition on domain entities. We present psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that the restricted view better describes what speakers know when they know the meaning of a determiner. In particular, we find that when asked to evaluate sentences of the form every F is G, participants mentally group the Fs but not the Gs. Moreover, participants forego representing the group defined by the intersection of F and G. This tells against the idea that speakers understand every F is G as implying that the Fs bear relation (e.g., inclusion) to a second group.