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Crossroads Semantics
- Author(s):
- Hanna de Vries (see profile)
- Date:
- 2017
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M61V5BD1Z
- Abstract:
- This study investigates how the availability of quantificational distributivity depends on the morphosyntactic number of the VP, based on two different case studies: first, the behaviour of sentences with a group NP subject (such as 'the class' or 'my family') in British English; and second, the interpretation of coordinated VPs in sentences like "The guests are surrounding the newlyweds and singing or dancing". I argue that distributivity is only available when the VP is plural, not when it is singular or uninflected. This approach goes back to Link's (1983) original intuition that pluralisation and distributivity are two sides of the same coin. It also provides support for compositional analyses of semantic pluralisation, according to which predicates originate as singular and are pluralised at a higher derivational level, instead of being 'born plural' as in e.g. Krifka (1992), Landman (1996), and Kratzer (2008).
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
paper-crit-final.pdf