A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian para...

Somewhat surprisingly, there is little work addressing this question even though there are two distinguished traditions each concerned with a subset of the paradigm. On the one hand, Generalized Quantifier Theory (GQT) offers an analysis of expressions as in (1)a,b as run of the mill quantifiers, while the theory of comparative constructions, analyzes expressions as in (1)d,e as amount comparat...

Plural logic adds to singular logic plural variables and a two-place connective ‘is/are among’, written ‘ ́’. Superplural logic adds to plural logic higher-level variables and higher-level twoplace connectives ‘are among’, written ‘ ́n’. This thesis examines the linguistic, logical, and philosophical status of superplural logic. I begin by asking whether the idea of a superplural logic is intelli...

Formalisms involving some degree of nondeterminism are frequent in computer science. In particular, various programming or specification languages are based on term rewriting systems where confluence is not required. In this paper we examine three concrete possible semantics for nondeterminism that can be assigned to those programs. Two of them –call-time choice and run-time choice– are quite w...

The paper investigates the memory-based learning (MBL) paradigm as a model of productive linguistic behavior in the domain of Dutch noun plural inflection. We first sketch the origin and background of the MBL approach, to then provide a short overview of Dutch noun plural inflection along with a detailed description of the use of MBL models for inflectional morphology. Results of a large number...