Universal quantifiers and generic expressions

is (at least) two ways ambiguous. The reading most commonly thought of is the one in which any linguist you can find will sing. This I will call the 'open class' reading, since the class of linguists referred to is open; if I is true, all tokens of the type linguist will be found to sing. This is the usual reading given to standard universal quantifiers, restricted or unrestricted, in logical form. It appears that the most suitable interpretation of an open class is a unbounded set: an open class is not necessarily an infinite set, but the interpretation of the quantified expression must not change truth-value as new members are (indefinitely) added to the set. The second reading is less commonly noticed and is most easily evoked with a context which br ings i t out: