Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’ (Mary read the books on the reading list, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn’t read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences (‘quasi-universal’ rather than simply ‘universal’ due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as homogeneity, cf. Lobner in Linguist Philos 23:213–308, 2000). Building on previous works (in particular Krifka in Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136–153, 1996 and Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1–28, 2012), we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ (Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language, University of Vienna, 2015), which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions.

中文翻译：

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解释复数谓词：同质性和非极大性

跨多种语言的复数明确描述显示了两个众所周知的特性。首先，它们可以产生所谓的非最大阅读量，从某种意义上说，它们“允许例外”（玛丽阅读了阅读清单上的书籍，在某些情况下，即使玛丽没有阅读，也可以判断为真阅读清单上的所有书籍）。其次，虽然它们在肯定句中倾向于具有准普遍的量化力量（“准普遍”而不是简单的“普遍”，因为我们刚刚提到了例外的可能性），但它们倾向于在以下范围内被存在主义解释否定（通常称为同质性的属性，参见语言学哲学 23:213–308, 2000 中的 Lobner）。基于以前的作品（特别是 Krifka 在 Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136–153, 1996 和 Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1–28, 2012），我们提供了一种理论，其中包含复数明确表达的句子触发一系列可能的解释，并且语言使用的一般原则解释了它们在各种上下文和句法环境中的解释。我们的理论解决了这些先前工作遇到的许多问题，并且具有更广泛的经验覆盖，因为它为显示复数限定词、量词和绑定变量之间复杂相互作用的句子以及涉及非分配谓词的情况提供了精确的分析. 由此产生的提案与 Križ 的替代提案（自然语言语义中的同质性方面，维也纳大学，2015 年）进行了简要比较，