Abstract
In the so-called reverse proportional reading (Herburger in Nat Lang Semant 5(1):53, 1997), the truth conditions of statements of the form many/few \(\phi \)\(\psi \) appear to make reference to the ratio of the individuals that are in the extensions of both \(\phi \) and \(\psi \) to the individuals that are in the extension of \(\psi \). The analysis of such readings is controversial. One prominent approach assumes they are a symptom of many and few making reference to a context dependent standard of comparison. We observe that this initially attractive approach systematically undergenerates, failing to capture pervasive reverse proportionality in environments that remove context dependency of the standard. Instead, we propose that reverse proportionality in such cases can arise from the underspecification of the measure function underlying the meanings of many and few.
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For comments and discussion, we would like to thank the audience at Sinn und Bedeutung 23 in Barcelona (in particular Ora Matushansky, Maribel Romero, Stephanie Solt, and Rob van Rooij), the members of the Semantics Research Group at McGill University (in particular Aron Hirsch), the members of SemanticsBabble at UCSD, three anonymous reviewers for Linguistics and Philosophy, and David Shanks. The authors acknowledge support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Insight Grant #435-2016-1376 (Bale, Schwarz), and Insight Grants #435-2016-1448 and #435-2013-0592 (Schwarz).
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Bale, A., Schwarz, B. Proportional readings of many and few: the case for an underspecified measure function. Linguist and Philos 43, 673–699 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09284-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09284-5