Most: the View from Mass Quantification

Abstract

It is currently assumed that most can quantify over mass domains [12][14]. The crosslinguistic data (English, Romanian, Hungarian and German) examined in the paper indicates that this is true of entity (type e)-restrictor most but not of set (type <e,t>)-restrictor most, which strongly supports the view that mass quantifiers denote relations between entities rather than relations between sets [26] [21] [14]. Nevertheless my proposal differs from previous proposals in assuming a more constrained view of the syntax-semantics mapping.