## KISSing semantics: Subregular complexity of quantifiers

🕑 9 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 July 26, 2019 in Discussions • 🏷 subregular, strictly local, tier-based strictly local, monotonicity, quantifiers, semantics, typology

I promised, and you shall receive: a KISS account of a particular aspect of semantics. Remember, KISS means that the account covers a very narrowly circumscribed phenomenon, makes no attempt to integrate with other theories, and instead aims for being maximal simple and self-contained. And now for the actual problem:

It has been noted before that not every logically conceivable quantifier can be realized by a single “word”. Those are very deliberate scare quotes around word as that isn’t quite the right notion — if it can even be defined. But let’s ignore that for now and focus just on the basic facts. We have every for the universal quantifier $$\forall$$, some for the existential quantifier $$\exists$$, and no, which corresponds to $$\neg \exists$$. English is not an outlier, these three quantifiers are very common across languages. But there seems to be no language with a single word for not all, i.e. $$\neg \forall$$. Now why the heck is that? If language is fine with stuffing $$\neg \exists$$ into a single word, why not $$\neg \forall$$? Would you be shocked if I told you the answer is monotonicity? Actually, the full answer is monotonicity + subregularity, but one thing at a time.

## Omnivorous number and Kiowa inverse marking: Monotonicity trumps features?

🕑 10 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 May 31, 2019 in Discussions • 🏷 features, monotonicity, morphosyntax, hierarchies, omnivorous number, inverse marking, Kiowa

I just came back from a workshop in Tromsø on syntactic features, organized by Peter Svenonius and Craig Sailor — thanks for the invitation, folks! Besides yours truly, the invited speakers were Susana Béjar, Daniel Harbour, Michelle Sheehan, and Omer Preminger. I think it was a very interesting and productive meeting with plenty of fun. We got along really well, like a Justice League of feature research (but who’s Aquaman?).

In the next few weeks I’ll post on various topics that came up during the workshop, in particular privative features. But for now, I’d like to comment on one particular issue that regards the feature representation of number and how it matters for omnivorous number and Kiowa inverse marking. Peter has an excellent write-up on his blog, and I suggest that the main discussion about features should be kept there. This post will present a very different point of view that basically says “suck it, features!” and instead uses hierarchies and monotonicity.