Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare Plurals, Bare Conditionals, and Only

The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its 'prejacent'). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be...

Bare Plurals, Situations and Discourse Context

Edinburgh University for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the participants of ITALLC 96, the anonymous referees for that conference and for this volume, and to the audience of a seminar I gave at the University of Texas at Austin in September 1996, for many perceptive questions and comments on this paper and related work.

A Situation-Theoretic Interpretation of Bare Plurals

Between Kinds and Properties: Bare Plurals across Languages

It is well known that English sentences containing bare plurals (henceforth BPs) are ambiguous. Under one reading, they can be interpreted as a predication of some property directly of a kind, as in (1a), which says that the kind dog is extinct. Alternatively, they can express some characterizing property of instances of a kind, as in (1b), which says that, in general, individual dogs are intel...

On the Meaning of Shenme 'what' in Chinese Bare Conditionals and its Implications for Carlson's Semantics of Bare Plurals

This paper shows that the semantics of shenme 'what' exhibits a double quantification phenomenon in Chinese bare conditionals. I show that such double quantification can be nicely accounted for if one adopts Carlosn's semantics of bare plurals and verb meanings as well as the assumption that shenme 'what' may denote kinds of things as bare plurals do.