Interpretations of Plural Noun Phrases in Korean

Abstract

Since plurality becomes a hot issue in semantics, the general consensus is that the domain of individuals includes both atomic and plural individuals as Link (1983) discusses. In his 1984 paper, however, Link argues that this domain is not rich enough to deal with a full range of interpretations of plural NPs and thus postulates group, a higher-ordered entity consisting of a sum of individuals. This new entity has raised an intense debate among semanticists; Link (1984) and Landman (1989) argue for the group readings of ordinary plural terms, and Schwarzschild (1992) and Barker (1992) are against the idea. Part of difficulties behind this discussion is that English does not provide conclusive evidence for or against groups, which becomes a stumbling block to further research. Interestingly, Korean has two forms of plurals: one with the plural marker tul and the other without the marker. For example, people is translated into either salam-tul person-tul or salam person in Korean. Both forms of NPs are widely used to deliver a plural reading. A general belief on these dual forms has been that they do not show any difference in their interpretations, which has served as evidence for non-sensitivity to number in Korean. (cf. Kang 1994 etc.) However, I will argue that Korean does distinguish singular and plural NPs in a way different from English-typed languages. A plural NP with tul is interpreted as a sum while a plural without tul is used as a group. I will argue for this distinction, considering distributivity, group properties, and contextual preferences. I will further discuss the fact that group readings are affected by the properties of predicates and thus propose in the framework of event semantics that groups are event-dependent entities.