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Quantifiers
Perhaps the most famous use of quantifiers comes from a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln in which the 16th president of the United States declared that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Quantifiers are expressions like some people, many people, most people, and all the people, and they allow us to express generalizations about sets of individuals. As such, quantifiers lie at the heart of the expressive power of language. The quantificational apparatus of natural language is also extraordinarily complex, and it raises a host of questions for linguistic analysis and language acquisition. Developmentally, children start using quantifiers in ...
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