Friends and Colleagues: Plurality and NP-Coordination

This paper presents a set of largely novel data concerning conjunction inside the noun phrase, and shows how this little-studied domain includes structures with readings which are quite unexpected under any current theory of coordination. Moreover, these readings vary across languages in an interesting and systematic fashion. To address this problem, we outline a new proposal for the interpretation of conjunction that can handle these data, but can also, we believe, be extended to the whole phenomenon of coordination. We deduce the cross-linguistic variation from an independently motivated theory of the syntax-to-semantics mapping, in which a parametric difference exists in the way that natural languages obtain the semantics of number, starting from the same set of functional projections within the DP. Our analysis is intended partly as a case-study in the interplay between the syntax and semantics of functional heads; the account of conjunction that we develop provides a tool for further syntactic and semantic analysis of the DP.