Friends and Colleagues: Plurality, Coordination, and the Structure of DP

Starting from an analysis for the crosslinguistic variation in the grammaticality of DP-internal conjunctions such as This [man and woman] are in love, this 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 in 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.

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