Superplurals in English - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Analysis Année : 2008

Superplurals in English

Oystein Linnebo
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 843018
David Nicolas

Résumé

It is now widely believed among philosophers and logicians that ordinary English contains plural terms that may refer to several things at once. But are there terms that stand to ordinary plural terms the way ordinary plural terms stand to singular terms? Let's call such terms superplural. A superplural term would thus, loosely speaking, refer to several “pluralities” at once. It is reasonably straightforward to devise a formal logic of superplural terms, superplural predicates, and even superplural quantifiers (Rayo 2006). But does this formal logic reflect any features of natural languages? In particular, does ordinary English contain superplural terms and predicates? The purpose of this note is to address these questions. We examine some earlier arguments for the existence of superplural expressions in English, and find these arguments to be either inconclusive or not sufficiently far-reaching. Then we present some better examples of the superplural in ordinary English.

Mots clés

Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Linnebo-Nicolas-Superplurals.pdf (36.72 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Loading...

Dates et versions

ijn_00175619 , version 1 (28-09-2007)
ijn_00175619 , version 2 (26-10-2007)
ijn_00175619 , version 3 (03-12-2007)

Identifiants

Citer

Oystein Linnebo, David Nicolas. Superplurals in English. Analysis, 2008, 68 (299), pp.177-269. ⟨10.1093/analys/68.3.186⟩. ⟨ijn_00175619v3⟩
82 Consultations
165 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More