Every Provides an Implicit Comparison Class When Each Does Not
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Abstract
Although the English universal quantifiers "each" and "every" are highly similar, it's often noted that "each" is 'more individualistic' than "every" in some way. In a recent proposal, outlined in Knowlton (2021), this difference is explained in terms of distinct lexical meanings. The idea is essentially that the meaning of an expression like "every frog" has a semantic constituent that corresponds to the plurality "the frogs", whereas the meaning of "each frog" introduces no such plural element. The bulk of the evidence in support of this view comes from sentence verification tasks (e.g., participants recall group properties, like average frog color and the number of frogs, after evaluating sentences like "every frog is green" better than after evaluating corresponding sentences with "each"). To broaden the empirical landscape, we test a novel prediction of this semantic proposal: since the mental representation that serves as the meaning of "every" calls for grouping the things quantified over, that group representation should be available to serve as the comparison class for predicates like "is the same color" and as a plural antecedent for predicates like "was told that they should jointly select a winner". We show that this prediction is borne out in a simple forced choice judgment study: "every NP" is preferred over "each NP" in both cases, at least relative to baseline preferences for using either quantifier.