Manuel Kriz (Vienna)
New arguments for higher-order pluralities
Since Link (1983), it is standard in linguistics to take definite plural noun phrases like “the students” to refer to a particular kind of entity, a plurality. Individual students stand in a parthood relation with that entity, and the domain of individuals is taken to have the structure of a model of classical mereology. This means, in particular, that pluralities are “flat”: there is no distinction between a plurality pluralities, and a plurality consisting of all the members of other pluralities. This assumption was defended against early challenges by Schwarzschild (1996) and has since stood largely unquestioned in the linguistic literature. The purpose of this talk will be to raise this issue again and explore new arguments to the effect that we need pluralities not to be flat: plurality formation should work like set formation, rather than set union, so that the domain of individuals has the structure not of classical mereology, but of full set theory.