A New Semantics for Group Nouns

Abstract

Group nouns such as committee, family, bunch (of flowers), pile (of dishes), etc. exhibit behaviors that seem to pull us in opposing directions. As various researchers have noted (Landman 1989, Barker 1992, Schwarzschild 1996), certain of their properties suggest that they denote atoms (elements of the ontology that lack proper parts), while others suggest that they denote pluralities (outputs of the sum formation operation). The approaches to the semantics of group nouns that have been proposed in earlier work fall into three classes: (i) those that assign group nouns a plural denotation (Munn 1998, Elbourne 1999), whereby a group noun DP denotes in a context c the set of the group’s members at c; (ii) those that assign group nouns an atomic denotation (Barker 1992, Schwarzschild 1996); (iii) those that construe a group noun denotation as a peculiar class of entity in its own right – a group or ‘upsum’ (Landman 1989), a singleton set whose member is the plurality from which the group is formed. There are of course conceptual reasons to be dissatisfied with each of these approaches: the first makes it necessary to postulate higher-order pluralities in order to account for the possibility of pluralising groups (see Schwarzschild 1996 for arguments against appeal to higher order pluralities in general); the second requires stipulation of a membership function in order to capture the relationship between a group and its members; the third augments the ontology. To these objections this paper adds two empirical ones. We show that contrary to what has been assumed in previous work (Barker 1992, Schwarzschild 1996), there are two classes of group nouns which we term ‘committee nouns’ and ‘collection nouns’, each of which requires a different semantics. Additionally, we offer novel data that suggest that committee nouns are inherently intensional – a departure from the focus on extensional properties found in earlier work. Finally, we propose a new semantics for committee nouns that can account for both previously discussed data and the empirical observations contributed by this paper.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.