Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality
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Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality Manuel Križ1
· Benjamin Spector2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’ (Mary read the books on the reading list, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn’t read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences (‘quasi-universal’ rather than simply ‘universal’ due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as homogeneity, cf. Löbner in Linguist Philos 23:213– 308, 2000). Building on previous works (in particular Krifka in Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136–153, 1996 and Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1–28, 2012), we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ (Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language, University of Vienna, 2015), which has similar
The authors would like to thank Philippe Schlenker, Roger Schwarzschild, and the paper’s reviewers for valuable comments and discussion. This research received support from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) Grants ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL, and ANR-14-CE30-0010-01 TriLogMean. Manuel Križ also acknowledges support from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.313610 and from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Project Number P 31422.
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Manuel Križ [email protected]
1
Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria
2
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, CNRS, EHESS, PSL Research University, CNRS, Paris, France
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M. Križ, B. Spector
coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions. Keywords Pluralities · Homogeneity · Non-maximality · Imprecision · Definite descriptions
1 Introduction Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’. That is, the sentence in (1), in some contexts, can be judged true even if there are a few of the relevant books t
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