Abstract
Kaup, B., Kelter, S. & Habel, C. (2002). Representing referents of plural
expressions and resolving plural anaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes,
17, 405-450.
In this paper, two views for mentally representing referents of plural expressions are contrasted, (a) the atomic-tokens view, according to which the denotation of a plural expression is represented by a number of distinct tokens, and (b) the assemblage-token view, according to which it is represented as a single whole. Linguistic data suggest that the atomic-tokens view is appropriate for partitive plural NPs (e.g., most of the orphans ; both of the cars ) and functionally similar expressions (e.g., most orphans ; both ), whereas the assemblage-token view is appropriate for unmarked plural expressions (e.g., the orphans , my cars , they ). This conjecture was investigated in 2 experiments with German participants, contrasting the pronoun sie ( they ) and the partitive pronoun beide ( both ). In Experiment 1, off-line tasks were used to investigate whether the interpretation of a sentence's predicate depends on the pronoun used in the grammatical subject position. In Experiment 2, participants read texts containing a pronoun in different contexts, and sentence reading times were measured to find out whether or not the pronoun triggered a grouping of the individuals referred to. The results support the hypotheses derived from linguistic analyses.
Barbara Kaup