Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language

The project aims at describing the expression and properties of quantification in diverse languages of the world, based on a unified questionnaire. Quantificational structures of 34 languages were described at some length, and the questionnaire itself provides a comparative profile for English.

Languages of our sample

In the first volume, five of the 16 languages we studied are Indo-European, from different branches: Western Armenian, German, Greek, Italian and Russian. The other 11 come from different phyla from Europe (Basque, Hungarian), the Caucasus (Adyghe), the Middle East (Hebrew), Africa (Malagasy, Wolof), Asia (Japanese, Mandarin), India (Telugu), and the Americas (Garifuna, Pima). In terms of surface syntax our languages include some that might be considered non-configurational (Adyghe, Pima), two that are verb initial (Garifuna, Malagasy), some that are SVO (Hebrew, Italian, Wolof), some that are SOV (Basque, Japanese, Telugu) and some in which basic word order patterns are not so neatly sketched (e.g. German, Greek, Mandarin).

In Volume II, two of the 18 languages studied represent the two major branches of Indo-Iranian (Hindi and Persian), two are Sino-Tibetan (Cantonese and Naxi), and two are historically related sign languages. The other 12 come from different phyla from Africa (Dan), Asia (Kusunda, Malayalam), New Guinea (Nen, Nungon), Middle East (Turkish), Indonesia (Uma Baha), Australia (Warlpiri), as well as North (Chicasaw, Gitksan), Central (Q'anjob'al) and South America (Quichua). In terms of surface syntax our languages include some that might be considered non-configurational (Warlpiri), two that are verb initial (Gitksan, Q'anjob'al), some that are SVO (Cantonese), some that are SOV (Chicasaw, Dan, Malayalam, Naxi) and some in which basic word order patterns are not so neatly sketched (e.g. Nen, Quichua, Uma Baha).

Outcomes of the project

For the main generalizations we found, see the Overview chapter of Volume II. The descriptions of quantificational systems in individual languages were published two volumes of the Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy book series:

• • Edward Keenan and Denis Paperno. Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 90. Springer, 2012.

  • Denis Paperno and Edward Keenan. Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume 2. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 97. Springer, 2017.

Manuscript versions of the individual chapters can be found below.