This article is initially concerned with a famous constraint on the class of possible determiners in natural languages: the so-called Conservativity Constraint. We shall briefly illustrate the force of this constraint and informally sketch Keenan and Stavi (1986)’s view according to which the Conservativity Constraint derives from the boolean structure of natural language semantics. We shall proceed to discuss certain well-known linguistic categories that have been argued to be interpreted by non-conservative functions: only and the relative proportional determiners many and few. We shall take the challenge posed by the existence of these categories in order to propose an alternative to the Conservativity Constraint. This alternative will be dubbed the Witness Set Constraint, which is inspired in Barwise and Cooper (1981)’s considerations on the semantic processing of generalized quantifiers. We shall defend that the proposed constraint does not suffer from the empirical shortcomings that have been attributed to the Conservativity Constraint, and indeed, we shall argue in detail that it correctly predicts (a) the existence of conservative determiners, (b) the non-existence of certain non-conservative determiners, such as inner negations, cardinal comparison determiners and the converses of non-trivial proportional determiners, and most importantly, (c) the existence of the non-conservative functions denoted by only and the relative proportional determiners many and few. This line of reasoning suggests that the class of functions from properties to sets of properties denoted in natural languages typically by determiners is constrained by a principle that simplifies the semantic processing of generalized quantifiers.

中文翻译：

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证人集合约束

本文最初关注自然语言中可能的确定因素类别的一个著名约束：所谓的保守性约束。我们将简要说明该约束的作用力，并非正式地勾勒出Keenan和Stavi（1986）的观点，根据该观点，保守性约束源自自然语言语义的布尔结构。我们将继续讨论某些众所周知的语言类别，这些类别被认为是由非保守功能来解释的：只有而且相对比例决定因素很多。我们将应对这些类别的存在所带来的挑战，以便提出一种保守性约束的替代方案。此替代方法称为“见证集约束”，这是受Barwise和Cooper（1981）关于广义量词语义处理的考虑启发的。我们将辩护说，拟议的约束不会遭受归因于保守性约束的经验缺陷，并且的确，我们将详细地论证它正确地预测了（a）保守决定因素的存在，（b）非保守决定因素的存在。某些非保守确定子的存在，例如内部否定，基数比较确定子和非平凡比例确定子的对立，最重要的是，（c）存在仅由表示的非保守函数，相对比例确定子很多很少。