The Animacy Hierarchy was introduced as a cross-grammatical factor which governs, in different languages, widespread splits of nominal categories, including case or number marking. Among othser phenomena, the Animacy Hierarchy has been invoked to describe the lexical distribution of associative plurals. In this paper I argue that associative plurals as an interpretation of nominal plurality is not licensed by the high position the respective noun holds on the Animacy Hierarchy but is a combined effect of coercion by the unique reference inherent to proper names and associative links easily recoverable for human referents. Interpretation of associative plurals relies upon activation of set relations its referent holds to other entities in the speech act situation. Associative plural is argued to be an indexical rather than a functional semantic category.∗

Animacy层次结构是作为一种跨语法因素引入的，它以不同的语言来管理名义类别的广泛划分，包括大小写或数字标记。在其他现象中，Animacy层次结构已被调用来描述关联复数的词汇分布。在本文中，我认为，关联复数作为名词复数的解释不是由相应名词在Animacy层次结构中所处的较高位置许可的，而是强制性的综合作用，固有名称固有的唯一引用和对它们的关联很容易恢复人类对象。关联复数的解释依赖于其关联对象在言语行为情况下对其他实体的集合关系的激活。