Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.g., the boxes each are heavy vs. the boxes together are heavy). This paper investigates the role of context in the disambiguation of plural predication. We address the key phenomenon of "stubborn distributivity," whereby certain pre...

Introduction This paper provides an original phonological analysis of some of the plural noun formations of Western Sisaala. Western Sisaala has several noun classes. The classes are distinguished by the suffixes to used to form the singular and plural. Moran (2006) tentatively identifies a few noun classes. In this squib, I discuss a subset of the plural forms attested in the language. Many of...

1 Determiners and Coordinated Nouns in English Singular determiner with singular noun, plural determiner with plural noun: (1) a. a boy/that boy/*those boy b. those boys/*a boys/*that boys Singular determiner with coordinated singular nouns: (2) a. that boy and girl/a boy and girl b. *those boy and girl Plural verb agreement with coordinated singular nouns: (3) a. That boy and girl *is/are my f...

When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express ‘more-than-one’ in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore children’s earliest expressions for ‘more-than-one’ by (a) examining longitudinal records for references to one vs. several obj...

This study reports the results of two behavioral and two event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments examining the processing of inflected words in advanced second language (L2) learners with Russian as their native language (L1) who learnt German as an L2 after childhood. Two different subsystems of German inflection were studied, participial inflection and noun plurals. For participial fo...

In this paper, we present a model of grammatical category formation, applied to English plural determiners. We have identiied a set of semantic features for the description of relevant meanings of plural deeniteness. A small training set (30 sentences) was created by linguistic criteria, and a functional mapping from the semantic feature representation to the overt category of indeenite/deenite...

It has been argued that quantum mechanics forces us to accept the existence of metaphysical, mind-independent indeterminacy. In this paper, we provide an interpretation indeterminacy involved in phenomena terms a view call Plural Metaphysical Supervaluationism. According it, is captured irreducibly plural relation between actual world and various misrepresentations it.

The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for the plural anaphor in question. As a means of explanation for preferred and non-prefer...