Accessibility for Plurals in Continuation Semantics

On the Meaning of Shenme 'what' in Chinese Bare Conditionals and its Implications for Carlson's Semantics of Bare Plurals

This paper shows that the semantics of shenme 'what' exhibits a double quantification phenomenon in Chinese bare conditionals. I show that such double quantification can be nicely accounted for if one adopts Carlosn's semantics of bare plurals and verb meanings as well as the assumption that shenme 'what' may denote kinds of things as bare plurals do.

Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics

We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural language semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lexical semantic: coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, distributive, coverings,. . . ) can be modelled.

Plural Semantics for Natural Language Understanding - A Computational Proof-Theoretic Approach

The semantics of natural language plurals poses a number of intricate problems – both from a formal and a computational perspective. In this thesis I investigate problems of representing, disambiguating and reasoning with plurals from a computational perspective. The work defines a computationally suitable representation for important plural constructions, proposes a tractable resolution algori...

Dynamic Semantics of Plurals

Properties, Plurals and Paradox

It has been argued that an objectual semantics for plurals falls victim to Russell's paradox, and that a nominalistic semantics should therefore be preferred (Boolos 1984); similar considerations have sometimes been extended to other types of abstract reference, in particular to property talk. We suggest that this line of argument is mistaken: deeply entrenched features of ordinary language gua...