Pragmatic Scale and the Properties of Scalar Quantificational Determiners

Abstract

A notion of linguistic scale is examined in connection with some scalar quantificational determiners such as all, most, many, and some in English and their correspondents in Korean. The widely-used definition of scale which is based on the identity of syntactic category and the linear ordering by the degree of semantic strength among the scalar predicates is not adequate enough to explain some set of facts about implicature and entailment that involve quantificational determiners. Attention is paid to many and most (in English and in Korean) that require a context parameter to get properly interpreted. They should be represented not as occupying a point on a scale but as occupying some interval. I also suggest that the properties of a scalar quantificational determiner including mono tonicity and class-inclusiveness play an important role in scalar entailment and implicature, and therefore have to be considered in forming a linguistic scale.