Bob Carpenter (bc10+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Tue, 17 Oct 1995 10:01:28 -0400 (EDT)
I would suggest that semantic considerations should also come into play when determining issues such as whether we treat the bare plural as being identical to a plural noun. IF you believe that bare plurals denote properties, AND that plural nouns denote properties, this would make sense (a lot of people do believe this). Any other account of the semantics of plurals would call for at least a semantic difference between plural nouns and noun phrases. The same could be said for just about any category that undergoes detransitivization. If we can live with the semantics just having no role fillers for the object in 'Kim ate' then there's no problem. But if we want an explicit existential, then 'ate' can't have a semantics that is equivalent to its intransitive form. (See van Noord et al.'s paper on why unfilled roles are problematic for generation (basically, because 'Kim ate' has a representation that unifies with that of 'Kim ate beans'); also consider what the closed world interpretation of types and features would mean in these cases.) - Bob Carpenter
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