Dear students,
Today we looked at the semantics of English the in the context of our new semantics for nouns. We saw that formulating it in terms of maximality, rather than uniqueness, can make it work for both singular and plural nouns (Question that can be explored in the final assignment: would our maximality semantics for the definite article work with dual nouns, or would we need something else? What predictions do we make in this regard? Are they met?).
We also saw that there are at least two kinds of VPs, collective and distributive ones, and that we can use our distinction between atomic/simple and non-atomic/complex individuals to cash out the difference.
As usual, wherever I see that there's potential for further exploration, I suggest topics for the final assignment--as above, or as in class. In class, we briefly discussed whether languages like Spanish have two definite articles, one for singular nouns (la casa 'the house') and a different one for plural nouns (las casas 'the houses'). I said there are reasons to think Spanish only has one definite article--you could explore them, or perhaps even find reasons to think the opposite!
I will be returning feedback on Puzzle 2 this week. We discussed general feedback on Puzzle 1 in class (it can also be found in QMPlus; see the week 1 folder).
Until next week!
Luisa.
