where ‘aa’ is a plural term, and ‘F’ a plural predicate. Following George Boolos (1984) and others, many philosophers and logicians also think that plural expressions should be analysed as not introducing any new ontological commitments to some sort of ‘plural entities’, but rather as involving a new form of reference to objects to which we are already committed (for an overview and further det...

Aim of the paper is to revise Boolos’ reinterpretation of second-order monadic logic in terms of plural quantification ([4], [5]) and expand it to full second order logic. Introducing the idealization of plural acts of choice, performed by a suitable team of agents, we will develop a notion of plural reference. Plural quantification will be then explained in terms of plural reference. As an app...

We give in this paper an explicit formal account of plural semantics in the framework of continuation semantics introduced in [1] and extended in [4]. We deal with aspects of plural dynamic semantics such as plural quantification, plural anaphora, conjunction and disjunction, distributivity and maximality conditions. Those phenomena need no extra stipulations to be accounted for in this framewo...

We give in this paper an explicit formal account of plural semantics in the framework of continuation semantics introduced in [1] and extended in [4]. We deal with aspects of plural dynamic semantics such as plural quantification, plural anaphora, conjunction and disjunction, distibutivity and maximality conditions. Those phenomena need no extra stipulations to be accounted for in this framewor...

Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months of age. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S. Yang, & S. Carey, 2007). The authors used 3 experim...

The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from 2-year-old children for sets of size two and four and for insta...

Despite the theoretical importance of the processes of generalization to the development of morphological rules, not much is known about the basic developmental trend or the relevant processes. The present study seeks to answer the question: at what age are children able to generalize the plural to new nouns. In a six-week longitudinal study, children aged 17.5 to 28 months participated in a sp...

In 3 experiments, native speakers of German named pictures of 1 or 2 objects by producing singular or plural noun phrases consisting of a definite gender-marked determiner and a noun. When singular and plural determiners differed (masculine and neuter gender), naming latencies were longer for plural utterances than for singular utterances. By contrast, when singular and plural determiners were ...

hSTRAcT. It is argued that the English ‘bare plural’ (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the ‘generic’ use of the bare plural (as in ‘figs bark’) and its existential or ‘indefinite plural’ use (a...

in this research, it has been tried to survey certain persian sentences and based on the linguists' ideas the existence of the number phrase in definition phrase in the persian language is demonstrated. then it has been attempted to show that the position of the plural morpheme in persian, quite similar to the other languages, is the core of the number phrase. along with surveying the feat...