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It has traditionally been assumed that Natural Language uses explicit quantifier expressions (such as "all" and "most", "the" and "a") for the purpose of quantification. We argue that expressions of the first type are comparatively rare in real world Natural Language sentences, and that the latter (articles) cannot be considered straightforward quantlfiers in the first place. H o w ever, practically all applications of Natural Language Processfng require sentences to be quantified unambiguously. W e llst a few possible (syntactical, semantical, a n d "pragmatical") sources of "implicit" quantiflcatlonal information in Natural Language; they combine in sometimes intricate. | HOW DOES NATURAL LANGUAGE QUANTIFY Michael Hess University of Zurich Seminar of General Linguistics Plattenstrasse 54 CH-8032 Zurich Switzerland ABSTRACT It has traditionally been assumed that Natural Language uses explicit quantifier expressions such as all and most the and a for the purpose of quantification. We argue that expressions of the first type are comparatively rare In real world Natural Language sentences and that the latter articles cannot be considered straightforward quantifiers in the first place. However practically all applications of Natural Language Processing require sentences to be quantified unambiguously. We list a few possible syntactical semantical and pragmatical sources of implicit quantificational Information In Natural Language they combine In sometimes intricate ways to give a sentence a more or less unambiguous quantification. 1. THE LACK OF EXPLICIT QUANTIFICATION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE 1.1 INTRODUCTION The subject of the present paper Is not strictly one of Computational Linguistics. Neither does it outline a working computer program nor investigate a linguistic problem with the help of computational methods. Although the subject may be purely linguistic in character it Is particularly relevant to Computational Linguistics. Moreover it seems to have been Ignored by most non-computa-tional linguists. Computational as well as non-computational linguists agree that we have to represent Natural Language sentences as quantified logical sentences either in a graphical variant of logic such as semantic networks or in some other form of logic. However non-computational linguists do not very often use real-world examples in their investigations they create their own example sentences to make a certain point. Everything which is not in the primary focus of their interest is made so explicit as to become largely self-explanatory. They tend for instance to create only sentences where quantification is explicit. Computational linguists on the .
