Friends and colleagues: plurality, coordination, and the structure of DP

ABSTRACT: Starting from an analysis for the diverging crosslinguistic grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as this [man and woman] are in love, the article develops a theory of the syntax/semantics interface within the DP and a novel proposal for the interpretation of conjunction. The main claims are that plural/mass denotations are built in stages within the DP, by the combined effect of number features and semantic operators associated with functional heads; that languages differ as to whether the denotation of nouns is filtered for singular or plural number,and that the word and crosslinguistically denotes SET PRODUCT, an operation which, in different contexts, can mimic the behavior of intersection and union. Conclusions There is a long history of using conjunction as a tool to probe the syntax of non-coordinated structures (often with controversial results: see for example Steedman 2000). In this paper we have attempted simultaneously to use conjunction in a new way as a tool for exploring the syntax and semantics of nominal projections, and to developa semantics for conjunctionthat coversthis case but which holds out the possibility of being extensible beyond it. Conjunction, so simple in appearance, does not give up its mysteries easily; we hope at least to have shown that there are additional readings that any fully adequate account for conjunction will have to 42 give an account of, and that anchoring these readings to syntactic projections can lead to important and potentially far-reaching insights.