PLURAL BIRTHS

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...

Plural Quantification and Classes

A plural resolution logic

This paper presents an integration of centering theory ([GJW95]) into incremental dynamic logic. The formalism is based on an idea found in [vE00a], where contexts are permutable in order to model salience. Building on this idea, centering theory is restated as a formalism on contexts. Subsequently the system is used to consider some problems centering theory has once plurality is taken into ac...

Plural Discourse Reference

The goal of this additional section is to further explore the semantic notion of plurality and argue that, in addition to plural reference to collections, natural language interpretation involves a notion of plural discourse reference that is essential for the interpretation of quantificationally dependent pronouns (and anaphoric expressions in general, e.g., definites, partitives, reciprocals ...

Graphs of plural cuts

Plural (or multiple-conclusion) cuts are inferences made by applying a structural rule introduced by Gentzen for his sequent formulation of classical logic. As singular (singleconclusion) cuts yield trees, which underlie ordinary natural deduction derivations, so plural cuts yield graphs of a more complicated kind, related to trees, which this paper defines. Besides the inductive definition of ...