Strong Indefinites are not Quantificational: proportional MANY vs MOST

International audienceThis paper is concerned with the analysis of strong indefinites and inparticular of the proportional readings of many. Can we account for the proportionalreadings of many by assuming a uniform analysis, according to which many is acardinality predicate, or do we need to postulate an ambiguity between a cardinalitypredicate and a quantificational determiner (Partee 1989)? I will argue in favour of theuniform analysis by comparing proportional most with proportional many: it will beshown that the former is necessarily a quantificational determiner (as in GeneralizedQuantifier theory, contra Hackl 2009), whereas the latter is a cardinality predicateinside a strong indefinite DP. This somewhat paradoxical result (a strong DP built withweak many) will be given a compositional semantics by assuming that constituents ofthe form many NP are headed by a null Determiner that has the semantics of plural some