Cover not available
Part of
Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar
Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma
[Not in series 210] 2017
► pp. 177–189

Chapter 11
Licensing distributivity

The role of plural morphology

| Utrecht University
This study investigates how the availability of quantificational distributivity depends on the morphosyntactic number of the VP, based on two different case studies: first, the behaviour of sentences with a group NP subject (such as the class or my family) in British English; and second, the interpretation of coordinated VPs in sentences like The guests are surrounding the newlyweds and singing or dancing. I argue that distributivity is only available when the VP is plural, not when it is singular or uninflected. This approach goes back to Link’s (1983) original intuition that pluralisation and distributivity are two sides of the same coin. It also provides support for compositional analyses of semantic pluralisation, according to which predicates originate as singular and are pluralised at a higher derivational level, instead of being “born plural” as in e.g. Krifka (1992), Landman (1996), and Kratzer (2008).
Keywords: distributivity, plurality, group nouns, British English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some preliminaries
  • 3.The role of VP number in licensing distributivity: British English group NPs
  • 4.Pluralisation as the semantic correlate of number inflection: The (im)possibility of atom/set coordination
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.11dev
References (25)
References
Barker, Chris. 1992. Group terms in English: Representing groups as atoms. Journal of Semantics 9(1). 69–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bartsch, Renate. 1973. The semantics and syntax of number and numbers. Syntax and Semantics 2. 51–93.Google Scholar
Beck, Sigrid. 2001. Reciprocals are definites. Natural Language Semantics 9. 69–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beck, Sigrid & Arnim von Stechow. 2007. Pluractional adverbials. Journal of Semantics 24. 215–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Michael. 1974. Some extensions of a Montague fragment of English. UCLA dissertation.Google Scholar
Carlson, Greg. 1977. Reference to kinds in English. UMass dissertation.Google Scholar
Dowty, David. 1987. Collective predicates, distributive predicates, and all . Proceedings of the 3rd ESCOL. 97–115.Google Scholar
Geenhoven, Veerle van. 1998. Semantic incorporation and indefinite descriptions: semantic and syntactic aspects of noun incorporation in West Greenlandic. Stanford: CSLI Publishing.Google Scholar
Hoeksema, Jack. 1983. Plurality and conjunction. In Alice ter Meulen (ed.), Studies in modeltheoretic semantics. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Joh, Yoon-Kyoung. 2008. Plurality and distributivity. UPenn dissertation.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 2008. On the plurality of verbs. In Johannes Dölling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow & Martin Schäfer (eds.), Event structures in linguistic form and interpretation. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 1992. Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution. In Ivan Sag & Anna Szabolcsi (eds.), Lexical matter. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Landman, Fred. 1989. Groups. Linguistics and Philosophy 12. 559–605, 723–744. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1996. Plurality. In Shalom Lappin (ed.), The handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Link, Godehard. 1983. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: a lattice-theoretical approach. In Rainer Bauerle, Christoph Schwarze & Arnim von Stechow (eds.), Meaning, use and interpretation of language. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1984. Hydras. On the logic of relative constructions with multiple heads. In Fred Landman & Frank Veltman (eds.), Varieties of formal semantics. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Scha, Remko. 1981. Distributive, collective and cumulative quantication. In Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof & Theo Janssen (eds.), Formal methods in the study of language. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum.Google Scholar
Schwarzschild, Roger. 1996. Pluralities. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sternefeld, Wolfgang. 1998. Reciprocity and cumulative quantication. Natural Language Semantics 6. 303–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vries, Hanna de. 2013. Distributivity and agreement: New evidence for groups as sets. In Maria Aloni, Michael Franke & Floris Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Amsterdam Colloquium, 241–248.Google Scholar
. 2014. Lexical distributivity with group nouns and property indefinites. In Hsin-Lun Huang, Ethan Poole & Amanda Rysling (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 43, 91–102.Google Scholar
. 2015. Shifting sets, hidden atoms: the semantics of distributivity, plurality and animacy. Utrecht University dissertation.Google Scholar
Winter, Yoad. 2001. Plural predication and the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis. Journal of Semantics 18. 333–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. Atoms and sets: a characterization of semantic number. Linguistic Inquiry 33. 493–505. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Winter, Yoad & Remko Scha. 2015. Plurals. In Shalom Lappin & Chris Fox (eds.), Handbook of contemporary semantics (second edition). Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

del Barrio de la Rosa, Florencio
2022. El cada silente y la distributividad a distancia en el español rural europeo. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 73:1 ► pp. 278 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.