Quantifiers in Logic and Quantifiers in Natural Languages

Once upon a time most logicians believed that their quantifiers were obtained from the quantifiers of natural languages by abstraction or regimentation. (In this paper I shall restrict my attention to logicians' existential and universal quantifiers plus their counterparts in natural languages.) This belief was expressed in so many words time and again in textbooks and treatises of logic and in discussions of the philosophicalproblems of logic. When the syntax and semantics of natural languages began to be taken seriously by contemporary linguists, it nevertheless soon became clear that there are all sorts of subtle problems about natural-language quantifiers which have no counterpartin logicians' so-called quantification theory. Nor were most of these problems touched, let alone solved, by ordinary-language philosophers.