  This paper surveys the common approach to quantification and generalised
quantification in formal linguistics and philosophy of language. We point out
how this general setting departs from empirical linguistic data, and give some
hints for a different view based on proof theory, which on many aspects gets
closer to the language itself. We stress the importance of Hilbert's oper- ator
epsilon and tau for, respectively, existential and universal quantifications.
Indeed, these operators help a lot to construct semantic representation close
to natural language, in particular with quantified noun phrases as individual
terms. We also define guidelines for the design of the proof rules
corresponding to generalised quantifiers.
