Plurals Yoad Winter and Remko Scha April 2014
نویسندگان
چکیده
In English and many other languages, noun phrases are subcategorized for number: they are either singular or plural. Though strictly speaking a morpho-syntactic phenomenon, this subcategorization has important semantic correlates. Whereas singular noun phrases typically refer to atomic individuals or to quantifiers over such individuals, plural noun phrases typically involve reference to (or quantification over) collections of individuals. For instance, the sentence “the trees surround the pond” describes a relation between a collection “the trees” and an individual “the pond”. Despite their importance in many languages, collectivity phenomena were largely ignored in the proposals that laid the foundations of formal semantics of natural language (chapter [HIS]). Accommodating plurals and collectivity in formal semantics has turned out to be a major challenge. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of different approaches to these challenges and to summarize some of their achievements. We concentrate on plurals in English, but many principles in their treatment carry over to several other languages. After introducing in section 2 some central facts and terms, we move on in sections 3-5 to three problems that have propelled much of the research on plurals. One problem concerns the basic (‘ontological’) properties of the collections denoted by plural nominals. In section 3 we discuss mereological and set-theoretical approaches to collective reference, and concentrate on one central differences between different proposals: whether they treat collections as ‘flat’ sets of primitive entities, or as possibly ‘nested’ sets that recursively admit collections as their members. A second major problem is the nature of distributive interpretations of plurals: interpretations that involve quantification over parts of collections. In section 4 we distinguish two approaches for deriving distributive interpretations: the lexical approach, based on the meaning of predicates, and a variety of operational approaches, based on introducing phonologically covert operators in the semantic analysis. Finally, in section 5 we discuss the problem of collectivity with quantificational plurals. Again we will consider two central approaches: one approach that analyses quantificational expressions as modifiers of predicates, and another approach that analyses them as determiners, i.e. relations between predicates in generalized quantifier theory (chapter [GQ]).
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