Gather/numerous as a mass/count opposition

Abstract

Predicates like gather and be numerous have both been described as 'collective predicates,' since they predicate something of a plurality. The two classes of predicates differ, however, with respect to plural quantifiers (e.g. all), which are grammatical with gather-type predicates but ungrammatical with numerous-type predicates. Here, I show that the gather/numerous opposition derives from mereological properties that are familiar from the domains of telicity and mass/count. I address problems of undergeneration and overgeneration with two technical innovations: first, I weaken the property of divisibility to Champollion's (2015) property of stratified reference; second, I provide mechanisms to rule out accidental satisfaction of the logical property. From a broader perspective, we place collective predication in a larger context by building empirical connections to mass/count and collectivity across semantic domains.

Dependent plurals and three levels of multiplicity

“…This approach also immediately accounts for the lack of co-distributive readings in examples like (161), which I have argued pose a problem for Kuhn's (2020) proposal:…”

“…From the point of view of the dependents, what is needed is a unified semantic account of cardinality modifiers that would explain the broad contrast between 'bare' and (many different types of) 'measured' plurals. An account along these lines has recently been proposed by Kuhn (2020). In what follows, I present an alternative way of fleshing out this intuition, which is able to overcome the limitations of Kuhn's proposal.…”

“…In a recent paper, Kuhn (2020) has proposed to solve this puzzle by augmenting Champollion's account with a novel approach to the semantics of measurement predicates, including numerals. The idea is that measurement predicates introduce a special type of event which relates the entity being measured (stuff(e)) to the corresponding measurement (μ(e)).…”

“…Consider first how the predicate in ( 47) is derived compositionally. Kuhn (2020) does not discuss the details, but it seems fair to assume that the function of constructing the sum event is part of the semantics of the noun phrase: 20 (49) All the kids received gift bags containing fewer than 10 candies.…”

“…I am disregarding collective readings here, which pose an independent problem for the Stratified Reference account, cf. footnote 16.22 There is another, more technical, issue withKuhn's (2020) proposal. Take the example in (ia) with the event predicate in (ib):…”