The Case of Bare Plurals and Plural Definites. - Institut für Linguistik ...

Plural Definites: Unacceptability of (8)
(8) *The biologists that lectured on kangaroos at the conference
last summer are usually open-minded.
Most e [e ∈ Atom(σ{e’: arg*(e’, the_biologists e’’ )})
∧ e @ τ(e’’)]
[e ∈ Atom(σ{e’: open_m(e’) ∧ pres(e’)})]
(see appendix for details)
• Restrictor: eventualities take place before speech time.
• Nucleus: eventualities include speech time.
• Necessarily yields an empty intersection.
• The sentence is out.
Indefinites and Weak Quantifiers, Brussels 2005