Le Bruyn and de Swart (2022): Exceptional Wide Scope of Bare Nominals #
Bare plurals take narrow scope across languages, which Chierchia's kinds approach derives: the bare plural denotes its kind, and derived kind predication introduces an existential over the kind's instances where the kind meets the verb. Le Bruyn and de Swart observe that Dutch bare plurals scrambled over negation take wide scope while keeping their kind reading. A kind takes no scope, as a name takes none (Chierchia's §4.2), so the kinds approach still gives narrow scope after scrambling, while Krifka's existential shift makes the bare plural a quantifier that takes wide scope when scrambled.
Main results #
LeBruynDeSwart2022.chierchiaScrambled_iff: on the kinds approach scrambling changes nothing.LeBruynDeSwart2022.books_example: on a two-book model of (35), Krifka's scrambled existential is true and both narrow readings are false.
Implementation notes #
- Individuals are Link's nonempty sets of atoms,
Mereology.Individual, so no empty plurality satisfies a distributive predicate vacuously. Both derivations quantify over all pluralities of books, the instances of the kind; the plural noun's own extension, without the atoms, would change no truth value on the model. - The attested examples are rows of
Data/Examples/LeBruynDeSwart2022.json.
References #
A book of the attested example (35) is either finished or unfinished.
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- LeBruynDeSwart2022.instDecidableEqBook x✝ y✝ = if h : x✝.ctorIdx = y✝.ctorIdx then isTrue ⋯ else isFalse ⋯
books holds of every plurality of books, singular or plural.
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- LeBruynDeSwart2022.books x✝ = Set.univ
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A plurality was read to the end, distributively, when every book in it was finished.
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- LeBruynDeSwart2022.read x = (↑x ⊆ {LeBruynDeSwart2022.Book.finished})
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With Krifka's existential shift in place (40), no book was read.
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With Krifka's existential shift scrambled over negation (41), some book was not read.
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On the kinds approach (38), the bare plural shifts to its kind, and derived kind predication introduces the existential over its instances below negation.
Equations
- LeBruynDeSwart2022.chierchiaUnscrambled = ¬Quantifier.GQ.some ((Reference.iota (IsGreatest (LeBruynDeSwart2022.books ()))).elim ∅ Set.Iic) LeBruynDeSwart2022.read
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On the kinds approach with the kind scrambled over negation, the kind binds a kind-level trace below negation.
Equations
- One or more equations did not get rendered due to their size.
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Scrambling a kind over negation changes nothing, since a kind takes no scope, as a name takes none, so the kinds approach gives narrow scope at either position.
On the two-book model of (35), with one book finished and one not, Krifka's scrambled existential gives the attested reading, and the narrow readings, his in place and the kinds approach's at either position, are false.