The Processing of Plural Expressions

This paper reviews the psycholinguistic work on the processing of plurals and offers a novel account of how plural expressions are represented during comprehension. The evidence suggests that there are three distinct types of plural representation. The first type of representation is completely underspecified such that the plural expression may denote a singleton. The second type of representation specifies that the plural expression refers to multiple entities without individuating any of the entities. Finally, the last type of plural expression is fully specified in that the number of entities is known and the entities are differentiated. This account of plural representation is consistent with the semantic proposal that plurals are left unmarked for number compared to singulars. This proposal is also consistent with theories of sentence processing that allow some semantic information to be left unresolved during comprehension.