Abstract
One potential objection to the NP/S Analysis, perhaps more likely to be made by philosophers than linguists, is that it requires an ontological conunitment to the existence of groups. For example, (the non-contradictory reading of) John and Mary are a couple is analyzed as involving reference to the “group” of John and Mary. This group is an entity distinct from John and distinct from Mary, which the NP/S Analysis claims can have its own properties, independent of the properties of its members.
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Notes
It should be emphasized that the analyses given by these authors differ from one another both in substance and in motivation; and that the arguments given below against the Relational/S Analysis do not all apply to all of these authors' proposals. It should also be noted that Massey advocates a Relational/S Analysis only for certain examples, and an NP/S Analysis for others. Avoiding the claim that plural noun phrases refer to groups is also a central concern for Schein (1986, 1992, 1994), and Higginbotham and Schein (1989), but in this case the motivation is not ontological, and the analysis is not of the Relational/S variety. (It will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 7, below.) See also Boolos (1984, 1985a, 1985b) for relevant discussion.
See Morton (1975) for a presentation of how this can be done formally Of course even without this revision there is no requirement that sulface predicates must have a fixed number of argument places, since a surface predicate may correspond to more than one distinct predicate in logical form.
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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Lasersohn, P. (1995). The Relational/S Analysis. In: Plurality, Conjunction and Events. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8581-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8581-1_3
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