Distributivity and agreement: new evidence for groups as sets

This phenomenon has attracted some attention from formal semanticists, who have mainly investigated the way semantics influences agreement choice by attempting to relate the preference for singular or plural to various lexical properties of the predicate (e.g. Bennett, 1974; Barker, 1992; Pollard and Sag, 1994; Schwarzschild, 1996). However, the reverse whether agreement choice influences semantics has rarely been investigated. In this paper, I argue that there are systematic differences in interpretation between British English group noun sentences with a singular VP and their plural-VP counterparts, and that these differences tell us something about the set-theoretic structure of group noun denotations. First, I show how the availability of certain distributive interpretations can be used as a diagnostic for the semantic plurality of an NP. Then, I will show that these distributive interpretations are available with morphologically singular group NPs, but only if the VP is plural. This central observation is exemplified by contrasts like the following: