The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic and phonological abilities. The present paper reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of plural forms for both production and comprehension....

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 cond...

Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, which suggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more than one” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalar implicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence using a picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participants were equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as a picture of m...

This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g., arbre "tree"), whereas others are found more often in the singular (e.g., arc-en-ciel "rainbow"). In the input, children more frequently encounter these plural-oriented nouns a...

Inverse Linking constructions display an asymmetric requirement of “number concord” that can be summarized as follows: if the inversely linked quantifier is plural the host NP has to be plural as well. This paper argues that under suitable assumptions Beck’s proposal in [2] for definite plural DP-arguments of nouns can be extended to quantificational plural DPs in Inverse Linking constructions....

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...

The paper argues that two distinct and independent notions of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and quantification: plural reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference, i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects (e.g. atomic / non-atomic individuals) that is established and subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. F...

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), ...

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but not four objects from one. Thus, they failed to r...

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural or past tense suffixes, is generally assumed to reflect mastery of the relevant morphological process. An alternate view holds that the use of an affix reflects not only morphological competence, but also additional factors including syntactic, semantic and phonological abilities. The present paper reports on a set of experiments in suppor...