Generalized quantifiers and the square of opposition (Q802544)

The paper is devoted to the study of the following generalized quantifiers: almost all, most, many, few. They have been studied recently by many logicians and linguists (Rescher and Gallagher, Geach, Peterson, Thompson, Peterson and Carnes - their papers have shown that syllogistic logic and the method of Venn diagrams can be extended to accomodate sentences with those quantifiers; Barwise and Cooper have given the formal syntax and semantics for the family of modifications of the first- order predicate calculus containing also those quantifiers). The aim of the paper is to initiate a general study of quantifiers from a traditional perspective by studying rules of immediate inference and associated squares of opposition, appropriate to various classes of generalized quantifiers.