Semantics & Pragmatics I : 5 / 16 / 17 Handout Nouwen 2012 , “ Plurality ”
نویسنده
چکیده
(3) Carrying guns is illegal in Illinois. a. # “It’s OK to carry a gun as long as you don’t have more than one” b. “Carrying more than zero guns is illegal” • No morphologically plural DPs in sentence 1, but continuation indicates semantic plurality for both DPs: (4) Each boy drew a picture. They hung them on the wall. • Common assumption: plurals are semantically unmarked, in the sense that they can have singular or plural reference indiscriminately (Krifka 1989; Zweig 2009, etc.). The implication of plurality in sentences such as (5) I have children. is a quantity implicature arising from the speaker’s failure to use the more informative (6) I have exactly one child. • Puzzle for such approaches: why is it that most (though not all) languages have singular as the morphologically unmarked category, and the plural is morphologically marked?
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