Majority quantifiers based on nouns
Strings of the type the largest/LARGER PART or (THE) LARGE PART, together with MAJORITY nouns, are the most widespread means of expressing majority judgments. We take this to constitute evidence in favor of a compositional analysis, which builds the majority reading by combining the superlative form of the adjective LARGE (or the comparative or positive forms, in some languages) with the functional noun PART, which introduces an unspecified binary partition. We propose a possible extension of this analysis to abstract nouns of the MAJORITY type. We also discuss a peculiar type of relative superlative reading allowed by MAJORITY nouns (in addition to their majority reading), which is identical to the one observed by Kotek et al. (2011) for most of in English. We finally offer three case studies for the majority quantifiers found in Hindi, Latin, and Syrian Arabic.