September 24, 2004: Manfred Krifka, Bare Plurals: Kind referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither?

[Japanese | English]

Time:
4:30pm, September 24, 2004
Place:
Conference room, 3rd floor, Building 10, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo Komaba campus.
Speaker:
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt-University of Berlin and Center for General Linguistics, Berlin
Title:
Bare Plurals: Kind referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither?
Abstract:
The semantic nature of bare plurals and mass terms in English has been a subject of controversy: Carlson (1977) argued that they are, with few exceptions, kind referring; Wilkinson (1991) and Gerstner & Krifka (1993) argued that they are ambiguous between a kind-referring and an indefinite interpretation. More recently, Chierchia (1998) has revived the kind-referring analysis. In this talk I will show certain shortcomings with Chierchia's theory, and how apparent problems for the ambiguity hypothesis can be solved.

Opening the talk At Eika

University of Tokyo Semantics Research Group
Sponsored by the Center for Evolutionary Cognitive Sciences at the University of Tokyo

Last modified: 2004-09-26 16:35:10 JST