This work investigates the semantics of the adjectives of quantity (Q-adjectives) many, few, much and little, with the goal of providing a unified semantic analysis of this class, and in doing so exploring the semantics of quantity and degree more broadly.

My central claim is that Q-adjectives must be analyzed as degree predicates – gradable predicates of scalar intervals – with much of the semantic content traditionally ascribed to these words instead contributed by a set of null functional elements and operations. This proposal allows a compositional analysis of Q-adjectives across the wide range of syntactic positions in which they occur, including quantificational (many dogs bark), predicative (John’s friends are few), attributive (the little rice that remains), and especially differential ( many fewer than 100 students), the latter of which is problematic for theories that take Q-adjectives to be either quantifying determiners or cardinality predicates. The same mechanism also accounts for the operator-like behavior of few and little and the availability of much as a dummy element (much-support), and allows quantification over individuals to be analyzed via simple Existential Closure, without giving rise to spurious ‘at least’ readings for few/little.

I further show that patterns in the interpretation and distribution of Q-adjectives can be related to properties of the scales of whose intervals they are predicated. The vagueness of Q-adjectives and their apparent cardinal/proportional ambiguity can be accommodated via the manipulation of two elements in the scalar representation, the structure of the scale (bounded vs. unbounded) and the location of the standard of comparison, with no need to posit multiple lexical entries. Aspects of scale structure are also responsible for contrasts in distribution among individual Q-adjectives (e.g. a few vs. *a many; the problems were many vs. * the difficulty was much).

This thesis thus argues for the relevance of degrees and scales to the analysis of natural language meaning, while adding to recent work investigating subtle syntactic and semantic differences between superficially similar quantificational expressions, and developing compositional analyses of complex expressions of quantity. It further supports a view of nominal syntax in which functional elements contribute semantic content.