[This is an unpublished manuscript still undergoing revisions; before citing/disseminating, please check for more recent versions. Comments welcome!]

The tiny word ‘all’ and its cognates in other languages perform an impressive range of grammatical duties, which despite their various differences all share the same core meaning, usually…[Read more]

We examine three constructions across several languages in which a mass noun is embedded in what appears to be a count environment, but the construction as a whole remains mass. We argue that the discussed phenomena – ‘Q-noun’ constructions like ‘lots of water’, bare measure constructions like ‘kilos of sugar’, and pluralised mass nouns in…[Read more]

[This manuscript is an extended version of De Vries (2017, NLS). I originally intended to rework the second half into another journal paper, but never got around to it. I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in the relation between semantic incorporation and non-quantificational distributivity, as its analysis of the indefinite data makes…[Read more]

This study investigates how the availability of quantificational distributivity depends on the morphosyntactic number of the VP, based on two different case studies: first, the behaviour of sentences with a group NP subject (such as ‘the class’ or ‘my family’) in British English; and second, the interpretation of coordinated VPs in sentences like…[Read more]

In this paper I argue that there are two ways to derive distributive interpretations: one is based on a quantificational D-operator, the other is non-quantificational and involves lexical-conceptual reasoning along the lines of Scha (1981). I show that we need a theory of lexical distributivity to account for distributive interpretations with…[Read more]

A chapter written for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number (eds. Patricia Cabredo Hofherr & Jenny Doetjes).

Non-copy-edited preprint. To appear in L. McNally, E. Castroviejo-Miró, and G. Sassoon (eds). The Semantics of Gradability, Vagueness and Scale Structure. Language, Cognition and Mind series. Springer.