Semantics etc.

Angelika Kratzer. “On the Plurality of Verbs”. June 2005. To appear in: J. Dölling and T. Heyde-Zybatow (eds.), Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.

Abstract: This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with plural agreement features can ‘release’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations that are also available for singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that always require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology.

What is the role of events in all of this? Events have played a major role in the semantics of plurality since the pioneering work of Barry Schein and Peter Lasersohn. Yet to the present day, there is no consensus about the need of event-based accounts of plurality. Non-event- based analyses of plural phenomena continue to be proposed. The phenomena discussed in this paper all present small or not so small conceptual problems for event-less analyses, but can be given elegant accounts within frameworks that incorporate some version of a Davidsonian event semantics. The hope is that the elegance of proposals made possible in an event semantics might convince those who think that — for reasons we may never fully understand — conceptual elegance, rather than Spartan foundations, may give us a good bet on reality.

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