Plurality, Implicatures and Events

This paper presents a semantics for bare plurals in English, in their indefinite reading. It focuses on an old problem - dependent plurality - from a new perspective, bringing together with recent work on the semantics of plurality in non-dependency contexts (Krifka 2003; Sauerland 2003; Sauerland et al. 2005). In doing so, it shows that there is no need for a separate mechanism for dependent plurality; rather, a plurality implicature can account for the hehavior of bare plurals in all environments. A formalization of this implicature will be suggested building on work by Schein (1993)