Semantics of Plural Noun Phrases

摘要

Two approaches to plural Noun Phrases (NP's) are reviewed. The aim is to showthat their analysis of sentences such as the following can be improved upon: (1) two girls ate five sandwiches; (2) all boys crossed the street. Disregarding the issues of scope ambiguity, a matter quite separate from finding a proper semantics for plural NP's and thus ignored whenever possible, both Scha and Link attach different readings to (1): Scha nine, and Link four. In contrast, the semantics proposed takes it to be unambiguous. A collective and distributive reading is talked of, but only as a conceptually handy way to distinguish between two types of situations which, among other types, may verify sentence (1). (1) is considered vague as to being collective, distributive or otherwise. Scha and Link are discussed, and a semantics for plural NPs characterized by the following properties is presented: sentences get a unique meaning in a compositional way in which the subject NP has the object NP within its scope; the semantics works for arbitrary NP's; all NP's are of the same type and no NP is structurally ambiguous between a distributive and a collective reading; restriction is made to NP's containing count nouns, allowing standard type logical techniques rather than using an algebraic semantics along the lines of Link.