Plurals

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of different approaches to the challenge of accommodating plurals and collectivity in formal semantics. It concentrates on plurals in English, and then examines problems that have propelled much of the research on plurals. One problem concerns the basic (“ontological”) properties of the collections denoted by plural nominal. The chapter discusses mereological and set‐theoretical approaches to collective reference, and concentrates on one central difference between existing proposals: whether they treat collections as “flat” sets of primitive entities, or as possibly “nested” sets that recursively admit collections as their members. A second major problem is the nature of distributive interpretations of plurals: interpretations that involve quantification over parts of collections. The chapter distinguishes two approaches for deriving distributive interpretations: the lexical approach, and a variety of operational approaches. Finally, it deals with the problem of collectivity with quantificational plurals.