Indeterminate-based Quantification --- Is It Quantificational?
The main concern of this contribution is the following puzzle: In Uralic languages bare indeterminate pronouns (or particle + pronoun complexes)
have been known to have a variety of readings; most prominent are indefinite construals, well within the Haspelmath spectrum (from specific-known to unknown--irrealis). Universal quantification is in principle expressible with
indeterminates, but, to my knowledge, this is not a fully exploited option in these languages (unlike Japanese, where the combination of a pronoun
with the particle MO expresses universal quantification , cf. Kratzer--Shimoyama 2002).
The questions that arise are 1) why universal readings are not expressed with a pronoun +
particle complex, and 2) when there is such a complex (e.g. Hungarian minden-ki lit. every-who), why its behaviour is exceptional (compared to its
indefinite counterparts such as vala-ki lit. VALA-who `someone').
A possible answer to this puzzle (relying chiefly on Old Hungarian data, together with samples from other Uralic languages) involves a blocking effect.
In Old Hungarian the relevant factor may be the presence of
so-called A-quantifiers: quantificational affixes (e.g. OH -keed) quantified over events, while adverbial maximality operators could involve collections in
their entirety, "ignoring", as it were, single individuals. (This explanation entails that Hungarian minden `every' needs to be re-examined, since,
according to the blocking argument, its very existence becomes a puzzle.)
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