Friends and Colleagues: Plurality and NP-Coordination

This paper presents a set of largely novel data concerning co junction inside the noun phrase, and shows how this little-studied domain includes s tructures with readings which are quite unexpected under any current theory of coordinati o . Moreover, these readings vary across languages in an interesting and systematic fash ion. To address this problem, we outline a new proposal for the int rpretation of conjunction that can handle these data, but can also, we believe , b xtended to the whole phenomenon of coordination. We deduce the cross-linguistic va riation from an independently motivated theory of the syntax-to-semantics mapping, in wh ich a parametric difference exists in the way that natural languages obtain the semantics o f number , starting from the same set of functional projections within the DP. Our analysis is intended partly as a case-study in the interp lay between the syntax and semantics of functional heads; the account of conjuncti o that we develop provides a tool for further syntactic and semantic analysis of the DP.