Context, Collectivity and Emptiness

The paper investigates a dynamic alternative to plural e-type strategies, which is general enough to model the truth-conditional as well as the dynamic aspects of both increasing and non-increasing quantifiers. It combines two proposals for plural dynamic semantics: (i) atom predication denotes a set of assignments and set predication denotes a set of sets of assignments and (ii) a witness condition for plural quantification involves checking whether the plurality associated with a specific variable in a set of assignments witnesses the quantification. (i) is a generalisation of van den Berg 1996’s notion of distributed context, while (ii) is a dynamic adaptation of Winter 1999’s determiner fitting approach to plural quantification. Technically, the proposal involves local assignments which are relativised to possible worlds. Pluralisation of such information states leads to possibly empty assignments to local variables. This allows us to refer to an information state which provides an empty set as a potential witness for plural quantification.