Current Topics in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Plural Expressions

About

What is the meaning of plural expressions in natural languages: "the students", "some apples", etc? While the answer to such questions seems pretty straightforward at first sight, appearances are deceptive. It turns out that providing a unified and empirically adequate theory of the meaning of plural expressions  in various syntactic environments is surprisingly difficult.
The goal of this class is to introduce students to one major approach to plural semantics, based on the the idea that plural expressions denote or quantify over so-called "plural individuals", and to present some recent research within this framework which aim to address puzzles pertaining to the interpretation of numerals and plural definites. The discussion will contain the presentation of formal models, a detailed investigation of their predictions, as well as data coming from experimental semantics. We will cover topics such as:
- The various types of readings that plural expressions can trigger depending on the type of predicate they combine with (collective readings, distributive readings, cumulative) - Typology of collective predicates (gather/numerous) - Maximality in the semantics of plural quantifiers (all, modified numerals) and its interaction with predicate types - Homogeneity and non-maximality

Course leader

Keny Chatain and Benjamin Spector

Target group

Students

Fee info