The Composition of Complex Cardinals

Ionin, Tania; Matushansky, Ora

doi:10.1093/jos/ffl006

Cited by 168 publications

(156 citation statements)

References 69 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

151

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This fairly traditional claim, whose philosophical roots can, in fact, be traced back to Frege's and Russell's conception of numbers, has been recently pursued within frameworks close to the one adopted here in, e.g. Landman (2004), or Ionin and Matushansky (2006). I am going to specifically follow the latter and assume that numbers are of type <<e,t>,<e,t>>, i.e.…”

Section: Sample Lexical Entriesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Sample Lexical Entriesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Note that these cases involve not only cardinal numerals but other types of Ds as well. Therefore, no analysis specific to cardinals, such as the one proposed in Ionin & Matushansky 2006, can cover all the relevant examples. That these DPs are semantically plural can be seen from the fact that they may occur as subjects of verbs like összegyülni 'to gather', as seen in (11a).…”

Section: :9mentioning

confidence: 99%

The semantics and pragmatics of plurals

Farkas

Swart

2010

S&P

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper addresses the semantics and pragmatics of singular and plural nominals in languages that manifest a binary morphological number distinction within this category. We review the main challenges such an account has to meet, and develop an analysis which treats the plural morpheme as semantically relevant, and the singular form as not contributing any number restriction on its own but acquiring one when in competition with the plural form. The competition between singular and plural nominals is grounded in bidirectional optimization over form-meaning pairs. The main conceptual advantage our proposal has over recent alternative accounts is that it respects Horn's 'division of pragmatic labor', in that it treats morphologically marked forms as semantically marked, and morphologically unmarked forms as semantically unmarked. In our account, plural forms are polysemous between an exclusive plural sense, which enforces sum reference, and an inclusive sense, which allows both atoms and sums as possible witnesses. The analysis predicts that a plural form is pragmatically appropriate only in case sum values are among the intended referents. To account for the choice between these two senses in context we invoke the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis, an independently motivated pragmatic principle. Finally, we show how the approach we develop explains some puzzling contrasts in number marking between English three/more children and Hungarian három/több gyerek ('three/more child'), a problem that has not been properly accounted for in the literature so far.

show abstract

“…Theories that adopt this view (Farkas and de Swart 2010;Bale et al 2011) are compatible with the view developed here. This may be seen as an advantage for them over theories that reject this assumption (Ionin and Matushansky 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stratified reference: the common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement

Champollion

2015

Theoretical Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why can I tell you that I ran for five minutes but not that I *ran to the store for five minutes? Why can we talk about five pounds of books but not about *five pounds of book? What keeps you from saying *sixty degrees Celsius of water when you can say sixty inches of water? And what goes wrong when I complain that *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, distributivity, and collectivity. This paper provides a unified perspective on these domains and gives a single answer to the questions above in the framework of algebraic event semantics.

show abstract

The Composition of Complex Cardinals

Cited by 168 publications

References 69 publications

Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation

Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation

The semantics and pragmatics of plurals

Stratified reference: the common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About