Three experiments explored the semantics of the mass-count distinction in young children and adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. Participants judged one large portion of stuff to be "more" than three tiny portions for substance-mass nouns (e.g. mustard, ketchup), but chose according to number for count nouns (e.g. shoes, candles) and object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture, jewelry). These results suggest that some mass nouns quantify over individuals, and that therefore reference to individuals does not distinguish count nouns from mass nouns. Thus, Experiments 1 and 2 failed to support the hypothesis that there exist one-to-one mappings between mass-count syntax and semantics for either adults or young children. In Experiment 3, it was found that for mass-count flexible terms (e.g. string, stone) participants based quantity judgments on number when the terms were used with count syntax, but on total amount of stuff when used with mass syntax. Apparently, the presence of discrete physical objects in a scene (e.g. stones) is not sufficient to permit quantity judgments based on number. It is proposed that object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) can be used to refer to individuals due to lexically specified grammatical features that normally occur in count syntax. Also, we suggest that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.

This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are (at least) two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with plural agreement features can ‘release ’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations with singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology. What is the role of events in all of this? Events have played a major role in the semantics of plurality since the pioneering work of Barry Schein and Peter Lasersohn. Yet to the present day, there is no consensus about the need of event-based accounts of plurality. Non-eventbased analyses of plural phenomena continue to be proposed. The phenomena discussed in this paper all present small or not so small conceptual problems for event-less analyses, but can be given elegant accounts within frameworks that incorporate some version of a Davidsonian event semantics. The hope is, then, that an event semantics for plurals might at least be a good bet about reality.

The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis of Dalrymple et al (1994,1998), which was originally proposed as a principle for the interpretation of reciprocals, is extended in this paper into a general principle of plural predication. This principle applies to complex predicates that are composed of lexical predicates that hold of atomic entities, and determines the pluralities in the extension of the predicate. The meaning

This paper proposes a new typology of predicates that serves as a basis for a general treatment of singular and plural noun phrases within generalized quantifier theory. Section 2 proposes that instead of the traditional distinction between "distributive ", "collective" and "mixed" predicates, a binary classification of predicates should be used according to their behaviour with plural determiners like all and exactly five. Predicates that allow collectivity with such determiners are referred to as

This paper introduces a novel approach to the semantics of plurals that is not based on the traditional distributive/collective distinction between predicates. Rather, the semantic number of nouns, verbs and adjectives is classified according to their behaviour under replacement of a plural determiner (e.g. all, plural no) by its singular counterpart (e.g. every, singular no). It is proposed that predicates that are insensitive to this replacement range over atomic entities, whereas number sensitive predicates range over sets of such atoms. This modeltheoretic property, together with morpho-syntactic number of predicates and the quantificational/non-quantificational distinction between noun phrases, governs the availability of collective interpretations. The emerging system offers a general solution to some long-standing problems concerning the differences between every, all and simple plural definites. 1 Introduction In a widely cited work, Vendler (1967:70-76) points ou...

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A range of research has explored the problem of generating referring expressions that uniquely identify a single entity from the shared context. But what about expressions that identify sets of entities? In this paper, I adapt a state-of-the-art semantics for plural descriptions—using covers to abstract collective and distributive readings and using sets of assignments to represent dependencies among references—to describe a search problem for set-identifying expressions that largely avoids the computational explosions inherent in computing or searching over the power set representation of salient collections.

This article studies the monotonicity behavior of plural determiners that quantify over collections. Following previous work, we describe the collective interpretation of determiners such as all, some and most using generalized quantifiers of a higher type that are obtained systematically by applying a type shifting operator to the standard meanings of determiners in Generalized Quantifier Theory. Two processes of counting and existential quantification that appear with plural quantifiers are unified into a single determiner fitting operator, which, unlike previous proposals, both captures existential quantification with plural determiners and respects their monotonicity properties. However, some previously unnoticed facts indicate that monotonicity of plural determiners is not always preserved when they apply to collective predicates. We show that the proposed operator describes this behavior correctly, and characterize the monotonicity of the collective determiners it derives. It is proved that determiner fitting always preserves monotonicity properties of determiners in their second argument, but monotonicity in the first argument of a determiner is preserved if and only if it is monotonic in the same direction in the second argument. We argue that this asymmetry follows from the conservativity of generalized quantifiers in natural language.

This paper examines interpretations of sentences with reciprocal expressions like each other or one another. We concentrate on cases where two or more separate groups can be discerned in the interpretation of the subject of predication. We study the availability of such partitioned interpretations with definite subjects and proper name conjunctions, and show new evidence that partitioning effects are independent of the semantics of the reciprocal expression, and are exclusively determined by the interpretation of the subject. We then propose that the effect is yet another result of the familiar dependency of descriptions on contextual quantifiers. 1 Introduction: partitioned interpretations of reciprocal sentences Sentences with reciprocal expressions like each other, one another or mutually involve a variety of interpretations, which have been in the focus of much recent research. In this paper we examine a special kind of interpretations of reciprocal

Goals of this talk: • to argue and present novel evidence that the scopal behavior of for-adverbials and of mass/plural quantifiers like all, most are governed by the same principles (Carlson, 1981; Moltmann, 1991, 1997). • to present a novel generalization in need of formalization.