Introduction

In chapter 5 I showed how a particle can be ambiguous between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional uses, and vague between different truth-conditional uses. In some respects wuu, which can mean ‘all’, ‘every’, ‘each’, ‘any’, ‘whole’, ‘very’ and ‘always’ raises similar issues. What makes it interesting to raise the question of vagueness versus ambiguity again is the fact that while some of the truth-conditional uses can be represented within predicate calculus, others cannot – which underlines the inadequacy of a purely predicate-calculus treatment of truth-conditional quantificational phenomena.

Though there is no question that all the quantificational (nonidiomatic) uses of wuu make a contribution to truth conditions, the question arises how the differences between the ‘all’, ‘every’ and ‘each’ interpretations are to be represented. They cannot be represented in terms of differences in quantifier, or in quantifier scope: rather, they appear to involve differences in the way the given quantifier is viewed: collectively or distributionally; ‘one by one’ or ‘one amongst many’. I will argue that these differences in interpretation are genuinely truth-conditional, and cannot be seen as involving constraints on relevance, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5. Since such differences cannot be captured in predicate-calculus terms, this provides further confirmation of the inadequacy of predicate calculus for natural-language semantics.

A related issue has to do with the domains of wuu – that is, the sets of individuals quantified over – how they are established and how they are interrelated in discourse. I shall discuss the fact that they seem to be indeterminate in some cases, and that speakers and hearers may not have the same assumptions about a domain; I shall also discuss the case where domains are ‘loosely’ fixed.