Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide metaphysics. By examining semantic theories proposed by philosophers and linguists, I argue that the semantics of a true theory in a natural language can serve as only a partial guide to metaphysics. Semantics will not always lead to determinate answers to questions of the form 'Does theory T carry an ontological commitment to Fs?' Further, semantics will never deliver answers to questions regarding the nature of Fs. If semantics is to be our guide, we must look to our best semantic theories to determine whether a theory carries ontological commitments to Fs. I develop criteria to determine when a semantic treatment is semantically adequate and should be counted amongst our best theories. Given these criteria, there can be more than one empirically adequate semantic treatment of a natural language theory. To determine ontological commitments I appeal to Quine's Criterion, which states that a theory has Fs in its ontology just in case it says or entails that there are Fs. To determine what a theory says and entails, we must appeal to semantic treatments. Since different equally adequate semantic treatments can yield different contents and entailments, Quine's Criterion delivers ontological commitments only relative to a semantic treatment. I then argue for a supervaluationist principle that delivers unrelativized, but possibly indeterminate, ontological commitments of a theory. Next, I apply my methodology to two case studies which exemplify two kinds of answers the supervalutationist principle might deliver concerning ontological commitments. I argue through an examination of data and formal treatments that plural expressions carry indeterminate ontological commitments to summed entities, while collective nouns carry determinate ontological commitments to group-like entities. Finally, I undertake an examination of what groups, things like teams, committees and courts, might be that accords with the minimal verdict delivered by the semantics of collective noun -- that they exist -- but which goes beyond this to examine their nature. I assess and reject the views of groups currently on offer and propose and defend a novel view of groups as realizations of structures. / text

Thesis (M. A. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2005 / Refer to the document

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Number is a grammatical category found in nearly every language around the world (Corbett, 2000). The syntactic expression of number is referred to as grammatical number. In English and French, two number categories are in use: singular and plural. Nouns that are written more frequently in their singular form are called singular-dominant, while those that are written more frequently in their plural form are called plural-dominant. Several lexical decision and picture naming studies have found that grammatical number and noun dominance interact, resulting in a surface frequency effect for singular-dominant nouns only. Singular-dominant nouns are recognized/named significantly faster in their singular form than in their plural form, while plural-dominant nouns are recognized/named equally fast in both forms (e.g., Baayen, Burani, & Schreuder, 1997; Biedermann, Beyersmann, Mason, & Nickels, 2013; Domínguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999; New, Brysbaert, Segui, Ferrand, & Rastle, 2004; Reifegerste, Meyer, & Zwitserlood, 2017). The objective of this thesis is to extend our understanding of the singular-dominant noun surface frequency effect in English and French by adopting three procedures. First, advanced linear mixed modelling techniques were used to improve statistical power and accuracy. Second, the noun dominance ratio technique (Reifegerste et al., 2017) was applied to investigate whether the surface frequency effect remains significant when noun dominance was treated as a continuous variable. Third, a determiner-noun number agreement task was created to determine whether the surface frequency effect could be reproduced in a novel task. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, two lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns while the noun dominance effect was non-significant. The interaction between grammatical number and noun dominance was significant in French and marginally so in English. The interaction pattern was identical in both languages, singular-dominant nouns demonstrated a surface frequency effect while plural nouns did not. In Study 2, three determiner-noun number agreement tasks (NATs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns. No other effects were significant. Incorporating irregular singular nouns (e.g., bonus) and plural nouns (e.g., mice) as foils produced the same results. In Study 3, two LDTs and one NAT were conducted. Lexical decision results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns. However, the effects of noun collectivity and animacy were significant in English only; non-collective nouns were recognized faster than collective nouns while inanimate nouns were recognized faster than animate nouns. Number agreement results revealed that in English, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns; no other effects reached significance. Taken together, my studies confirm that a strong surface frequency effect exists during visual word recognition for singular-dominant nouns. However, the surface frequency effect does not extend to the formation determiner-noun number agreement decisions, which were influenced nearly exclusively by grammatical number.

Collective nouns are a category of nouns that refer to a group of people or things. This group of nouns has the special characteristic that when in singular form, they can be followed by either a singular or a plural verb. This feature of collective nouns has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and traditional grammarians, who in the last few decades have tried to explain this phenomenon by investigating different perspectives on it, thereby taking into consideration morphological, syntactic and semantic, as well as variational and discourse-specific differences (Biber et al, 1999; Levin, 2001; Depraetere, 2003). One of the main assumptions that has been suggested in the literature is that collective nouns have specific concord preferences, allowing for either a singular or a plural verb or both. Another assumption that has also been invoked is that when collective nouns are part of a complex noun phrase, as for instance in the phrase the rest of (the) society, in which the collective is part of the of-phrase, the plural tends to be used. Based on these two assumptions, the aim of this thesis is to further investigate, firstly whether a singular or a plural verb is used after expressions where a collective noun is being modified by a quantifying noun expression (e.g. the rest of, part of), secondly whether the concord preferences the collective nouns have an influence on the verbal concord and finally if there is any difference between the two main varieties of English, namely British and American English. Since this is a topic of actual language use, the methods used in corpus linguistic research are also employed in the thesis. More specifically, by looking at the instances of quantifying noun expressions modifying collective nouns as well as the frequency with which such constructions occur in two different corpora, the enTenTen13 and the GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English), the thesis seeks to answer the aforementioned questions. From the analysis of the data it was concluded that in some cases the concord preferences of the collective nouns influenced the verb form following the complex noun phrases, whereas in others these preferences did not determine the selection of the verb form. Syntactic, semantic as well as contextual factors seem to also influence the selection of the verb form. Furthermore, variational differences occurred, since in British English the plural was more often used with collective nouns that prefer the plural concord over the singular one or that are more variable in their concord patterns, whereas in American English the singular was the preferred choice in all cases.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how Swedes writing in English construct number concord with collective nouns. This was done by studying three primary corpora: the Swedish English Newspaper Corpus (SWENC) and the press sections of Frown (American English) and F-LOB (British English). The findings were compared with the results in the Blogs in English by Swedes Corpus (BESC), Frown (American English) and F-LOB (British English). The SWENC contains texts from three online newspapers and one corporate newsletter in English, all of which are written by Swedes. The BESC contains texts from Swedes blogging in English. Frown and F-LOB contain texts from fifteen text genres in the 1990s. The results in the SWENC are discussed and compared with the press sections of F-LOB and Frown. The results are also compared with the BESC, Frown and F-LOB in order to see whether there is regional and stylistic variation. The results show that Swedes prefer singular verbal concord with collective nouns even though plural forms occur which seem to be closer to F-LOB Press (BrE) than Frown Press (AmE). In contrast, the SWENC differs from the press sections of Frown and F-LOB in constructing pronominal number. This difference could be influenced by Swedish usage which allows both singular and plural pronominal number with collective nouns. The study also shows that plural forms of political parties that seem to constitute collective units show variation in Sweden whereas such nouns take only plural concord in both American and British English.