Nominalizing Quantifiers

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source ISSN: 0022-3611
Author Moltmann, Friederike
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 14, 2026, 07:00 (UTC)
Created May 14, 2026, 07:00 (UTC)
Identifier halshs-00791954
Language fr
contributor Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) ; Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UP1)-Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL (DEC) ; École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Moltmann, Friederike
date 2003-10-14T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 44b06de8-ad5e-40b5-a826-5fc07cd14715
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2024-12-09T00:00:00
set_spec type:ART