The Plural Is Semantically Unmarked
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
The semantics and pragmatics of plurals
This paper addresses the semantics and pragmatics of singular and plural nominals in languages that manifest a binary morphological number distinction within this category. We review the main challenges such an account has to meet, and develop an analysis which treats the plural morpheme as semantically relevant, and the singular form as not contributing any number restriction on its own but ac...
متن کاملSemantics & Pragmatics I : 5 / 16 / 17 Handout Nouwen 2012 , “ Plurality ”
(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 th...
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Semantic theories of number currently debate whether the plural is weak (referring to both collections and individuals) or strong (referring to collections but not individuals). The former view holds that the plural is ‘unmarked’ as it is less specific; for the latter view, the singular is simpler and therefore ‘unmarked’. This paper examines the inverse number marking system of Dagaare (Gur; N...
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Those numeral classifier languages like Korean, Japanese, and Chinese mobilize classifiers together with numerals in naming and counting objects in the world. Classifiers serve to classify objects according to their shape, function and other semantic features often culturally defined. Discrete (or fuzzy) numerals are used to count the number of objects. In Korean and Japanese, plural marking al...
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This paper considers the underspecification of distributive and collective readings of plural NPs in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994). We address some shortcomings in previous approaches in the underspecification literature, namely issues related to the assumption that plural NPs are semantically ambiguous betw...
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