Barwise & Cooper explain that this “proposed universal has the effect of ruling out many logically possible quantifiers as simple NP denotations. Examples are the denotations of ‘an even number of men’, ‘exactly three or exactly five men’, ‘all but one man’. It seems unlikely that any natural language would have a basic determiner meaning ‘an even number of’, ‘exactly three or exactly five’ or ‘all but one’.”
Barwise & Cooper explain that this “proposed universal has the effect of ruling out many logically possible quantifiers as simple NP denotations. Examples are the denotations of ‘an even number of men’, ‘exactly three or exactly five men’, ‘all but one man’. It seems unlikely that any natural language would have a basic determiner meaning ‘an even number of’, ‘exactly three or exactly five’ or ‘all but one’.”