Quantificational Variability Effects with Plural Definites: Quantification over Individuals or Situations?

Quantificational Variability Effects with Plural Definites: Quantification over Individuals or Situations?

In this paper we discuss the fact that not only adverbially quantified sentences with singular indefinites or bare plurals, but also ones containing plural definites show Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), i.e. they receive readings according to which the quantificational force of the respective DP seems to depend on the quantificational force of the Q-adverb. We show that if the Q-ad...

Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects.

Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, e.g., The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times (Majewski 2006, in preparatio...

The meaning of plural definites: A decision-theoretic approach

This paper has two mutually motivating goals. The empirical goal is to demonstrate that definite plurals are expressions whose interpretation requires an approach that incorporates the goals of the speaker and hearer. The theoretical goal is to contribute to the development of a mathematical model of the pragmatic reasoning involved in the interpretation of underspecified utterances. I propose ...

Plural Quantification and Classes

Necessitism, Contingentism and Plural Quantification

Necessitism is the view that necessarily everything is necessarily something; contingentism is the negation of necessitism. The dispute between them is reminiscent of, but clearer than, the more familiar one between possibilism and actualism. A mapping often used to ‘translate’ actualist discourse into possibilist discourse is adapted to map every sentence of a first-order modal language to a s...