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In:Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar
Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma
[Not in series 210] 2017
► pp. 177–189

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Chapter 11
Licensing distributivity

The role of plural morphology

 | Utrecht University
Published online: 12 April 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.11dev
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).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some preliminaries
  • 3.The role of VP number in licensing distributivity: British English group NPs
  • 4.Pluralisation as the semantic correlate of number inflection: The (im)possibility of atom/set coordination
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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