Hidden Trilogies of Universal Quantifiers: A syntactically based analysis of arabic kull and its kins

Distinct senses of universal quantification are expressed not only by vocabulary inventory variation, but also through features and categories which build the various quantifier types. It can be shown that the most productive Arabic universal kull (and arguably its kins in Semitic and other languages) conveys three universal quantifier senses, roughly equivalent to English all, every, and each (and not only just two, as commonly assumed). Similar trilogies are observed in Greek, French, or Hebrew (with two Q words, or just one). Thanks to their feature and category specifications, universal subtypes are more appropriately characterized in terms of Merge and Move syntactic operations, as in Chomsky (1995), Beghelli and Stowell (1997), and they conform to internal composition of variational quantifier meaning (as in e.g. Szabolcsi 2010, Mathewson 2013), and appealing results about distributivity (Tunstall 1998 & Champollion 2017, among others).