Groups versus covers revisited: Structured pluralities and symmetric readings

摘要

A number of natural language constructions seem to provide access to structured pluralities - that is, pluralities of pluralities. A body of semantic work has debated how to model this additional structure and the extent to which it depends on pragmatics. In this article, after controlling for the distinction between ambiguity and underspecification, we present new data showing that structured pluralities are sometimes but not always available, depending on the form of the plural noun phrase used. We show that these results challenge two longstanding theories of plurality. We sketch two different ways to account for these data and describe some of the diverging predictions they make.