Q-Adjectives and the Semantics of Quantity

Abstract

The adjectives of quantity (Q-adjectives) many, few, much and little stand out from other quantity expressions on account of their syntactic flexibility, occurring in positions that could be called quantificational (many students attended), predicative (John's friends were many), attributive (the many students), differential (much more than a liter) and adverbial (slept too much). This broad distribution poses a challenge for the two leading theories of this class, which treat them as either quantifying determiners or predicates over individuals. This article develops an analysis of Q-adjectives as gradable predicates of sets of degrees or (equivalently) gradable quantifiers over degrees. It is shown that this proposal allows a unified analysis of these items across the positions in which they occur, while also overcoming several issues facing competing accounts, among others the divergences between Q-adjectives and ‘ordinary’ adjectives, the operator-like behavior of few and little, and the use of much as a dummy element. Overall the findings point to the central role of degrees in the semantics of quantity.