Compatibility with absolutely has long been accepted as a diagnostic of end-point scalarity (cf. Lakoff 1972: 632-633, Horn 1972: § 2.3, Horn 2005: 194). Since the very notion of universal quantification entails complete coverage of a whole, including the extreme values within it, one would expect all universal quantifiers to be compatible with the adverb absolutely. This is indeed the case for all and every, as can be seen from I want absolutely all of them cleaned up by 5:00 and It’s a problem absolutely every teacher has at some point in their career. However, it is not the case for each:  *Absolutely each teacher has to sign up for a period of detention supervision. Does this imply that there are some universal quantifiers which evoke scalar end-points and others which do not? Why does each resist modification by absolutely, the tried-and-tested diagnostic for end-point scalarity? These questions will be examined in this usage-based paper based on over 1000 examples collected from the Internet. The focus will be mainly restricted to the contrast between each and every (since all is construed with plural nouns, it introduces a further variable into the comparison, while each and every are both construed only with singulars). Every is argued to denote the idea of sweeping through all the individual members of a group without excepting a single one until reaching the limit of the category, which gives it a natural affinity with the notion of absolute totality of coverage. If this is the sole thrust of the message to be expressed, as is usually the case when a universal quantifier is modified by absolutely, then every is the right tool for the job. Since each denotes individual attention to the members of a set, it distracts focus away from the endpoint, which explains the much lower frequency and greater difficulty in imagining a context in which absolutely each sounds natural. This combination is not strictly impossible however, and attested usage of this sequence is examined in which the speaker combines an insistence upon completeness of coverage with some sort of individual attention to, or one-to-one correlation with, the members of a set.

 

 

References

 

Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.

 

Horn, Laurence R. 2005. Airport’ 86 revisited: toward a unified indefinite any. In Gregory N. Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds). Reference and Quantification: the Partee effect. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 179-205.

 

Lakoff, George. 1972. Linguistics and natural logic. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds). Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 534-665.