Quantification

The aim of this review chapter is to provide an introduction to the formal diachronic study of the semantics and syntax of quantification. That is, we will focus on works which examine how the system of quantification has changed over time in a language or a set of languages. We restrict ourselves to formal approaches, namely ones which adopt or at least are informed by some formal frameworks of syntax or semantics and thus, aspire to move beyond the level of philological description and typological generalization. While for most linguists, the prototypical case of quantification is universal quantification over a set of individuals in the sense of Barwise and Cooper, the landscape is very broad and diverse. For reasons of space, and also in order to maintain a sensible division of labor with other chapters, we decided to focus on phenomena which at some level involve universal quantification in the logical sense. This decision luckily does not result in a significant loss of coverage: the bulk of formal diachronic study of quantification has indeed been devoted to universal quantification; while the study of existential quantification has been, with good reason, subsumed under the study of indefinites. Also, since diachronic change is often the result of reinterpretation through the mechanism of constant entailments (different constructions having similar or identical truth conditions), our discussion will inadvertently also touch upon related phenomena such as maximality operators, pluractionals, and free‐choice items (and indeed, indefinites).