Perestroika**
Recent discussion from the Semantics Reading Group: (We’re reading Kratzer’s unpublished manuscript The Event Argument.)
4000 passengers were served 1000 gin & tonics*.
Are the passengers sharing drinks in this sentence? That is, is it required that each of 4000 passengers received a drink? And now consider the following:
4000 passengers consumed 1000 gin & tonics.
And now:
1000 gin & tonics were served to 4000 passengers.
*(Tonic water and quinine therein courtesy of W.V. Quine, of course***.)
**(Title totally irrelevant.)
***(Don’t you dare believe anything Simon says about Quine.)
vudka
I have no trouble with 4000 passengers were served 1000 gin & tonics. Imagine–
I can’t believe how much alcohol was consumed on that trip. At dinner alone, the 4000 passengers were served 1000 gin & tonics, 2500 rum & colas, 1300 margaritas, and “sloe comfortable screw against the wall,” whatever that is.
Does it change it to add more alcohol as the object? My point is that the components of the object (the thousand G&T’s, or the 4,301 drinks) can be distributed among the components of the subject however they need to be. I definitely get that with “consumed”; I believe I also get that with “passengers were served drinks”. And “drinks were served to passengers”…er. Maybe?
What judgments does Angelika have? What judgments did y’all have?
Our group was initially split on the judgments for “passengers were served drinks”. Polly & I had a hard time with that, although Polly became more convinced of it being ok after the other two in our group brought up different possible scenarios, one of them being similar to the one you raised. We all agreed that “4000 passengers consumed” didn’t require each passengers to have a drink (or even part of one). With “drinks were served”, judgments were again split. At the time, I couldn’t get the reading where some passengers weren’t served g&ts, but now I’m starting to question my initial response.
It seems that for Angelika’s argument to hold, she would want that each of the sentences had at least the reading where every of the 4000 passengers received a drink since the line she is pushing is for the cumulative, non-team reading of sentences such as:
Three copy editors caught every mistake in the manuscript.
Her argument is that there is a reading of the sentence that requires each copy editor to have caught at least one mistake, and between the three all of the mistakes (the same mistake might have been caught one to three times) were caught.
What does that ignoramus have to say about Quine?
…a reading of the sentence that requires each copy editor to have caught at least one mistake…
The obvious reading, to me, is one that’s compatible with each copy editor having caught one mistake; but I’m not sure how you can force that.
I was about to say, “there’s a pretty easy-to-derive conversational implicature that each copy editor caught a mistake”–but that’s not right, is it? The conversational implicature is that each copy editor caught a mistake that the other two didn’t: “why didn’t the speaker say the more informative ‘two copy editors caught every mistake….’ Because that isn’t true; therefore, no matter which two copy editors you pick, there’s a mistake that those two didn’t catch, i.e. it was caught by the third one.” I don’t think you can calculate an implicature that allows one of the copy editors to be redundant.
You could try to force it by checking to see if it’s false in a situation where we know that one copy editor did no work: “The manuscript for the seventh Harry Potter book arrived this week. Unfortunately, one of our three copy editors has been home with the flu since the start of the month. Fortunately, we feel pretty confident that three copy editors caught every mistake in the manuscript.” But is it in fact false there (in the situation where there’s one copyeditor who caught no mistakes)? It seems merely infelicitous, i.e. underinformative: the speaker could have said the more informative “two copy editors” without changing the truth of the utterance.
Maybe I should read the Kratzer to see what she has in mind. (Sure, in all my spare time. Right.)
“Did you know that quinine is named after Quine? He was a very prominent chemist back in the day.”
quinine is pronounced nothing like Quine. (It’s actually [’kwi:ni:n], the name derived from the Quechua name for the plant from which the chemical can be extracted.)
That imp thought he could fool me. Psha.
Lance: Kratzer’s Chapter 2 is where all of this discussion is (the first chapter is mostly introductory and fluff). We have been considering the same point that you made, that perhaps these intuitions about all of the copy editors doing some relevant work falls out of conversational implicature. It’s a very valid point to make, I think, and yes, I also agree that there’s nothing that forces the reading where all the copy editors found at least one mistake. Polly noted that once you up the numbers, this reading really does not seem plausible.
Blackwell has just gotten a batch of 30 textbooks back from a copy editing house. There is a memo attached that says: 3000 copy editors caught every/1000 mistakes in the manuscripts.
While my intuitions about the flight passengers and drinks are not completely clear to me, they certainly are with the above. Nothing requires that each of the 3000 copy editors catches a mistake.
Hm. Fact about the size of the numbers; or fact about the subject number being greater than or less than the object number? So what are the judgments on:
Three copy editors caught both mistakes. — does this have a reading on which each of them caught at least one of the mistakes?
3000 copy editors caught 6000 mistakes in the manuscripts — does this still lack the reading that each of the copy editors caught at least one mistake?
The larger the gap between the number of subjects and objects (where there are more of the subject), the more I start really, really favoring other readings entirely. (”10,000 copy editors caught two mistakes in the manuscript”? Pretty much means either “each”, or “by their combined efforts”.)