Mass nouns and plural logic

@article{Nicolas2008MassNA,
  title={Mass nouns and plural logic},
  author={David Nicolas},
  journal={Linguistics and Philosophy},
  year={2008},
  volume={31},
  pages={211-244}
}
  • David Nicolas
  • Published 18 July 2008
  • Philosophy
  • Linguistics and Philosophy
A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993, Plurals and events. Cambridge MIT Press) and Rayo (2002, Noûs, 36, 436–464) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian paradox. And if we use predicate logic and… 
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46 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
4
Background Citations
13
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
1

46 Citations

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Encoding individuals in language using syntax, words, and pragmatic inference.
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It is argued that a complete understanding of how mass-count syntax encodes reality requires understanding how different aspects of language-syntax, lexical roots, word meanings, and pragmatic inference-interact to encode abstract, countable individuals.
Computing the Semantics of Plurals and Massive Entities Using Many-Sorted Types
TLDR
The specifics of the semantics for mass nouns can be integrated in a recent type-theoretical framework with rich lexical semantics, similarly to collective plural readings, and the significance of an higher-order type system for gradable predicates and other complex predications, as well as the relevance of a multi-sorted approach to such phenomena.
Bare nominals in Catalan and Spanish. Their structure and meaning
Superplural Logic Msc in Logic
Plural logic adds to singular logic plural variables and a two-place connective ‘is/are among’, written ‘ ́’. Superplural logic adds to plural logic higher-level variables and higher-level twoplace…
Back to basics: more is always much-er
Bresnan (1973) posited that more is uniformly analyzed as much-er, whether it appears with adjectives (more intelligent, redder) or nouns (more soup). On the earliest degree-semantic analysis of such…
Plurals and Mereology
TLDR
The author offers a precise characterization of the mereological approach and the semantic background in which the debate can be meaningfully reconstructed and concludes that the former remains a viable and well-motivated framework for the analysis of plurals.
Collective quantification and the homogeneity constraint
The main theoretical claim of the paper is that a slightly revised version of the analysis of mass quantifiers proposed in Roeper 1983, Lonning 1987 and Higginbotham 1994 extends to collective…
University of Birmingham Untyped Pluralism
: In the semantic debate about plurals, pluralism is the view that a plural term denotes some things in the domain of quantification and a plural predicate denotes a plural property, i.e a property…
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References

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How do we make sense of sentences with plural noun phrases in them? In Plurals and Events, Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that…
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