A common observation in studies of inflectional morphology is that words which are atypical members of their syntactic class often take a regular inflection, independent of their phonology. For example, in English we would say that the plural of the surname mann is manns although it has the same phonology as the noun man which has the irregular plural men. The same goes for the borrowed word ta...

The present paper discusses two interesting phenomena concerning phifeatures on plural pronouns: (i) plural pronouns that denote atomic individuals (‘dependent plural pronouns’), and (ii) plural pronouns with more than one binder (‘partial binding’). A novel account of these two phenomena is proposed, according towhich all occurrences of phi-features are both semantically and morphologically re...

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...

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...