{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03827460510328068, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010328068043742407, 'mean_word_length': 4.778947368421052, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Comments on Vagueness in Quantity by Stephanie Solt

There is a very active trend of research in linguistics at the moment about the right way to interpret vague expressions of quantification such as “many”, “few” and “most”. In this note I would like to focus my discussion on the second part of Solt’s exciting paper, regarding the meaning difference between the two determiner expressions “most” and “more than half”. The problem of the relation between those expressions has been addressed in a number of recent works, in particular by M. Ariel (2003, 2004), M. Hackl (2009) and by P. Pietroski et al. (2009). Like Solt, these authors give empirical evidence for the view that “most” and “more than half” make different contributions to the meaning of the sentences in which they occur. Importantly, however, they tend to agree that the truth conditions for complete sentences of the form “most As are Bs” and “more than half of As are Bs” are logically equivalent.2 Solt’s main emphasis in her paper is slightly different. It rests on the idea that “more than half” and “most” manipulate different scales of measurement, corresponding to different levels of informativeness. Because I find myself in agreement with most of Solt’s account in her paper (not to say more than half of it), in this commentary I would like first to adduce further evidence in favor of her semantic analysis of “most”, in particular concerning the need for measure functions. I then discuss the status of the entailment relations between “most” and “more than half” and some tentative counterexamples to either direction of implication between the two determiners.