Poznan09

Semantics of plurals

Eytan Zweig

This course will focus on several challenges that arise for a semantics that tries to account properly for plurals as well as singulars. These include:

- Questions of distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity.

- The behaviour of plurals in environments such as negation. Specifically, why is neither of the following sentences accpetable if Mary has exactly one child:

1. Mary has children.
2. Mary does not have children.

The interaction of plurals with other quantifiers, especially the so-called “dependent plural” phenomenon. Why does (3) appear true if each professor has one child, but (4) false?

3. All the professors have children.
4. Every professor has children.

home