Plural Languages, Plural Cultures. Communication, Identity, and Sociopolitical Change in Contemporary India.

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

Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages

In this chapter, we investigate the variation in form, syntax and semantics of the plural words found across the Alor-Pantar languages. We study five AP languages: Western Pantar, Teiwa, Abui, Kamang and Wersing. We show that plural words in Alor-Pantar family are diachronically instable: although proto-Alor-Pantar had a plural number word *non, many AP languages have innovated new plural words...

Vagueness and Plural Predication

This paper addresses the question of how to model the application of vague predicates like tall and bald to plural subjects like John and Mary and the men. In other words, we are interested in developing a logical analysis for natural language sentences like Mary is tall and The men are bald. In the past 30 years, much research has been devoted to finding the proper logical framework to model t...

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...