Plural Reference and Reference to a Plurality. A Reassessment of the Linguistic Facts

There are two fundamentally different views of the semantics of definite plural NPs. I will call them ‘Reference to a Plurality’ and ‘Plural Reference’. Reference to a Plurality is the view that definite plurals stand for a particular sort of entity, a plurality, more precisely a plurality ‘as one’. There are different formal conceptions of pluralities as ‘one’: as sums within extensional mereology or as sets or classes. On the extensional mereological view, which is the dominant one in current linguistic semantics, the semantics of a definite plural NP will look as in (1a), where s is the relevant situation containing a restricted domain of entities:

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