We consider collective quantification in natural language. For many years the common strategy in formalizing collective quantification has been to define the meanings of collective determiners, quantifying over collections, using certain type-shifting operations. These type-shifting operations, i.e., lifts, define the collective interpretations of determiners systematically from the standard meanings of quantifiers. All the lifts considered in the literature turn out to be definable in second-order logic. We argue that second-order definable quantifiers are probably not expressive enough to formalize all collective (...) quantification in natural language. (shrink)

We study the extension of dependence logic \ by a majority quantifier \ over finite structures. We show that the resulting logic is equi-expressive with the extension of second-order logic by second-order majority quantifiers of all arities. Our results imply that, from the point of view of descriptive complexity theory, \\) captures the complexity class counting hierarchy. We also obtain characterizations of the individual levels of the counting hierarchy by fragments of \\).