1 The semantics and pragmatics of plurals

This paper addresses the semantics and pragmatics of singular and plural nominals in languages that manifest a binary morphological number distinction on nouns. We develop our analysis against recent proposals in the literature that posit a strong semantics for the singular while taking the plural morpheme to be semantically vacuous. We propose an alternative account which treats the plural as semantically relevant and the singular as not contributing any number restriction on its own. The main conceptual advantage of our proposal is that it respects Horn’s division of labor so that morphologically marked forms are semantically marked as well. We also discuss a series of empirical challenges to previous analyses and examine how our solution meets them. The proposed account grounds the semantics of singular and plural nominals in bidirectional optimization over form/meaning pairs. Both an inclusive and an exclusive sum interpretation are available for plural nominals under this semantics, so we exploit the strongest meaning hypothesis as a pragmatic principle that decides between the two interpretations in context. The empirical coverage of the approach extends to subtle pragmatic distinctions within English as well as to some cross-linguistic contrasts that have not been discussed in the literature so far