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Friends and Colleagues: Plurality, Coordination, and the Structure of DP

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Starting from an analysis for the crosslinguistic variation in the grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as This [man and woman] are in love, this article develops a theory of the syntax/semantics interface within the DP and a novel proposal for the interpretation of conjunction. The main claims are that plural/mass denotations are built in stages within the DP, by the combined effect of number features and semantic operators associated with functional heads; that languages differ in whether the denotation of nouns is filtered for singular or plural number; and that the word and crosslinguistically denotes Set Product, an operation which, in different contexts, can mimic the behavior of intersection and union.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, AFB George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LL, UK

    Caroline Heycock

  2. Facoltà di Lettere, Università di Bergamo, Sede S. Agostino, Bergamo, 24100, Italy

    Roberto Zamparelli

Authors
  1. Caroline Heycock
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  2. Roberto Zamparelli
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Correspondence to Caroline Heycock.

Additional information

We would like to thank our patient and helpful consultants and correspondents, in particular Birgit Alber, Theodora Alexopoulou, Corine Astesano, Valentina Bianchi, Cécile de Cat, Pascal Denis, Cristina Figueredo-Silva, Alessandra Giorgi, Jack Hoeksema, Dimitra Kolliakou, Satu Manninen, Leonor Moral, Eva Safar, Vieri Samek Lodovici, Beatrice Santorini. We would also like to thank Barry Schein, Massimo Warglien, an anonymous Natural Language Semantics reviewer and audiences in Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Essex for their comments, in particular Alan Munn and Nick Asher. This work is supported in part by a Joint Activities Grant from the British Academy, which we gratefully acknowledge.

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Heycock, C., Zamparelli, R. Friends and Colleagues: Plurality, Coordination, and the Structure of DP. Nat Lang Seman 13, 201–270 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-004-2442-z

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