Interpreting Plural Predication: Homogeneity and
Non-Maximality
Manuel Križ, Benjamin Spector
May 2017
Plural definite
descriptions across many languages display two well- known properties. First,
they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they
‘allow for exceptions’ ('Mary read the books on the reading lis't, in some
contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn’t read all the books on the
reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal
quantificational force in affirmative sentences (‘quasi-universal’ rather than
simply ‘universal’ due to the possibility of exceptions we have just
mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation
(a property often referred to as homogeneity, cf. Löbner 2000). Building on
previous works (in particular Krifka 1996 and Malamud 2012), we offer a theory
in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of
possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account
for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our
theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has
broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences
that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and
bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates.
The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ
(2016), which has similar coverage but is based on a very different
architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions.