A Review of Researches on Quantification

by Takao Gunji

This brief article reports what was presented at the symposium on quantification at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, held at Nagoya Gakuin University on November 25, 2000. In this talk, a brief overview of the treatment of quantification in natural language semantics was given. The talk starts with the problem of propositional logic and need for predicate logic. Then, it is shown that the concept of quantification is extended in the generalized quantifier approach. The second half focuses on the treatment of what has been called donkey sentences and reviews several major approaches to this problem, including the discourse representation theory, E-type pronouns, and dynamic binding.