Quantifier (linguistics)
In linguistics and grammar, a quantifier is a type of determiner, such as all, some, many, few, a lot, and no, (but not numerals) that indicates quantity.
Quantification is also used in logic, where it is a formula constructor that produces new formulas from old ones.
Natural languages' determiners have been argued to correspond to logical quantifiers at the semantic level.
Introduction
All known human languages make use of quantification (Wiese 2004). For example, in English:
Every glass in my recent order was chipped.
Some of the people standing across the river have white armbands.
Most of the people I talked to didn't have a clue who the candidates were.
A lot of people are smart.
The words in italics are quantifiers.
There exists no simple way of reformulating any one of these expressions as a conjunction or disjunction of sentences, each a simple predicate of an individual such as That wine glass was chipped. These examples also suggest that the construction of quantified expressions in natural language can be syntactically very complicated. Fortunately, for mathematical assertions, the quantification process is syntactically more straightforward.