Multi-Level Plurals and Distributivity

We present a computational treatment of the semantics of plural Noun Phrases which extends an earlier approach presented by Scha [7] to be able to deal with multiple-level plurals ("the boys and the girls", "the juries and the committees", etc.) 1 We argue that the arbitrary depth to which such plural structures can be nested creates a correspondingly arbitrary ambiguity in the possibilities for the distribution of verbs over such NPs. We present a recursive translation rule scheme which accounts for this ambiguity, and in particular show how it allows for the option of "partial distributivity" that collective verbs have when applied to such plural Noun Phrases.