Exploring Quantifiers: Pragmatics Meets the Psychology of Comprehension

Abstract

If I hear that few students in Glasgow understand Japanese, what does this mean? For the past 15 years (Moxey, 1986; Moxey and Sanford, 1987), we have been trying to establish the psychological (processing) properties of natural language quantifiers, and how quantified statements are understood. This includes how they are used, how they are represented in the minds of producers and listeners, and how to capture their meaning in a psychologically plausible description. The venture was motivated by the frequency of quantity statements in everyday life (e.g., People often find statistics difficult; Few of our students know more than two languages), and by the obvious difficulties in working out just what quantifiers denote. Although we are primarily psychologists with an interest in language comprehension, working in a Cognitive Science environment guaranteed contact with both formal linguistics and logic. Since the most comprehensive accounts of the meanings of natural language quantifiers were formal (e.g., Barwise and Cooper, 1981; Keenan and Stavi, 1986; Westersthål, 1989; Zwarts, 1996) and not psychological, inevitably it was desirable that our psychological data made contact with formal theories. Equally, we believed that it was important for formal theories to be brought into contact with psychological data. Colleagues of a formal persuasion were interested in whether formal properties of generalized quantifiers, such as downward entailment, could explain the results of psychological experiments.