Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics
This work addresses semantic modeling challenges in linguistics, particularly for plural interpretations, but appears incremental as it builds on existing type-theoretical approaches.
The authors developed a type-theoretical framework for natural language semantics that extends Montagovian compositionality to include lexical phenomena like coercions and plurals, modeling various readings such as collective and distributive.
We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic: coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, dis- tributive, coverings,...) can be modelled.