Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean "John does not own more than one dog", but rather "John does not own a dog". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy)

Origins of the Quark Model

An intellectual history of the quark model prior to February 1964 is presented. Aspects of this history are best summarized by a parable: Man asked God for a riddle, and God obliged: "What is green, hangs from a tree, and sings?" This, of course, was a very difficult question. So man asked God for the answer, and God replied: "A herring!" "A herring? But why is it green?" "Because I painted it green." "But why does it hang from a tree?" "Because I put it there. " "And why does it sing?" "If it didn't sing you would have guessed it was a herring.

Memories of Murray and the Quark Model

Life at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann in the early 1960's is remembered. Our different paths to quarks, leading to different views of their reality, are described.Comment: Talk presented at the "Conference in Honor of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th Birthday," Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, February 24,2010. 18 pages, 4 figure

The syntax of manner quotative constructions in English and Dutch

This paper proposes an account of some properties of the manner quotative constructions be like [Quote] in English and hebben (zo)iets van [Quote] in Dutch. We make two main claims about these constructions. First, in the spirit of Rothstein’s (1999) proposal for adjectival predicates of copula be, we propose that eventive direct speech interpretations of these quotatives are derived via a coercion mechanism akin to those that make count readings out of mass nouns in the nominal domain. Second, adapting a proposal for be like originally made by Kayne (2007), we propose that some exceptional syntactic properties of be like as a quote introducer in English are explained by the presence of a silent something quantifier, which takes a like-headed PP as its complement. We compare English be like quotatives with innovative (zo)iets van quotative constructions in Dutch, which contain an overt something quantifier and behave similarly