A Remark on Collective Quantification
Juha Kontinen, Jakub Szymanik

Abstract:
We consider collective quantification in natural language. For many
years the common strategy in formalizing collective quantification has
been to define the meanings of collective determiners, quantifying
over collections, using certain type-shifting operations. These
type-shifting operations, i.e., lifts, define the collective
interpretations of collective determiners systematically from the
standard meanings of quantifiers. All the lifts considered in the
literature turn out to be definable in second-order logic. We argue
that second-order definable quantifiers are probably not expressive
enough to formalize all collective quantification in natural language.