Individuation and Quantification

Chris Barker Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego Judging from the way people talk, the number of entities in a given situation that get recognized as distinct individuals seems to depend on the specific communicative goals of a particular discourse. Admitting that semantic interpretation needs to provide a limited degree of ontological variability can resolve some empirical difficulties associated with Krifka’s (1990) treatment of examples like (1). (1) 4000 ships passed through the lock last year. The proposition expressed by this sentence will be true in any situation in which there are 4000 distinct ships, each of which passed through the lock during the previous year. However, as Krifka points out, (1) can also be used to describe a situation in which there are fewer than 4000 ships involved, provided that some of the ships pass through the lock more than once and the total number of lock traversals is at least 4000. We’ll need a way of talking about the two types of construals that is neutral with respect to the theoretical status of the objects being counted. (2) a. One-to-one reading: one ship for each counted thing. b. One-to-many reading: one ship for several counted things. The one-to-one reading is what any garden-variety theory of semantics would predict for (1). The one-to-many reading is a problem, however. Krifka (1990) gives a compositional analysis on which the readings of (1) arise from a polysemous zero determiner. As an alternative, following the lead of Gupta (1980), Carlson (1982), and Nunberg (1984), I will propose that what is going on here is a form of ontological variability: the semantics