Unity and Plurality: Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics
Massimiliano Carrara, Alexandra Arapinis, and Friederike Moltmann
Abstract
The aim of this volume is to present novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality, and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference—the view that definite plurals such as “the students” refer to several entities at once (the individual students)—is an approach favored by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals (“the students gathered”) not to be committed to entities bey ... More
The aim of this volume is to present novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality, and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference—the view that definite plurals such as “the students” refer to several entities at once (the individual students)—is an approach favored by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals (“the students gathered”) not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as “the students” to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. The volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. Thus, a good part of the contributions in this volume investigate new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology, and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.
Keywords:
Plural reference,
plurals,
natural language,
plural morphology semantics,
logic,
mass quantification,
mereology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198716327 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716327.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Massimiliano Carrara, editor
University of Padua
Alexandra Arapinis, editor
Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento
Friederike Moltmann, editor
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
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