No ‘No’: On the Crosslinguistic Absence of a Determiner ‘No’∗

This paper concerns the semantics of determiners. I point out that the currently dominant generalized quantifiers analysis of determiners has certain deficiencies. I then provide an alternative which seems offer some hope not suffer from the same deficiencies. It is generally believed that the semantics of all determiners fits into one or a limited number general schema. The same assumption is made also for other categorial classes. This assumption is well motivated, since there must be a gen-eral mechanism that relates syntactic structures to semantic representations. This mechanism can be easy and elegant in a straightforward way if the semantics of each syntactic class is internally uniform, such that for example all transitive verbs, or all complementizers belong to the same semantic type of things. The general schema of determiner quantification that is most popular these days is the generalized quantifier analysis. This analysis goes back to at least Mon