Speaker: Manuel Kriz (Vienna/Harvard) Time: Monday, March 10, 12-1:30. Location: 66-148
Sentences with definite plurals display a property known as ‘homogeneity’: (1a) is true if John read (roughly) all of the books, (1b) is true if he read none of the books. If he read half of the books, neither sentence is true.
(1)a. John read the books. b. John didn’t read the books.
The talk will be devoted to presenting this phenomenon in greater detail – including the way it extends to collective predicates – and laying out the problem of homogeneity projection. A sentence like (2) with a definite plural embedded unter a quantifier still has an extension gap (i.e. cases where neither it nor its negation are true).
(2) Every girl read the books.
The development of a principled theory to derive which situations are in the extension gap of such sentences poses considerable difficulties. The lack of a fully satisfactory theory forces an exploration of these issues by way of demonstrating how and why the approaches that have been tried fail.