Speaker: Yizhen Jiang (MIT)
Title: Putting bare plurals into context (joint work with Yasu Sudo)
Time: Wednesday, October 25th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Bare plurals give rise to plurality inferences in positive sentences but not in negative sentences. There are two main approaches to this phenomenon. The implicature approach derives plurality inferences via scalar implicatures (Ivlieva 2020, Spector 2007, Sudo 2023, Zweig 2009, a.o.). The homogeneity approach attributes plural interpretations to trivalent semantics of bare plurals and claims a parallelism between bare plurals and plural definites (Križ 2017). Specifically, these two approaches make divergent predictions regarding the availability of plurality inferences in negative sentences and their sensitivity to context w.r.t. sentence polarity. We report on three experiments investigating plurality inferences of bare plurals via precise manipulation of context.
Our results show: 1) Plurality inferences are available in simple negative sentences (Exp 1) and quantified negative sentences under proper context (Exp 2); 2) the context sensitivity of plurality inferences exhibits a symmetry w.r.t sentence polarity in simple sentences (Exp 1) but an asymmetry in quantified sentences (Exp 2); 3) Partial plurality inferences are available in both positive and negative sentences but are insensitive to contextual manipulation. These results pose challenges to both the implicature and homogeneity approach. We discuss possible directions for both approaches to address these issues.