ABSTRACT
Philosophers and logicians who study the semantics of natural language apply the distinction to natural language as well. Linguists who study the semantics of natural language were influenced by formal logic in their analyses. This chapter argues that the attempts to reduce plural referring expressions to expressions of other kinds are unjustified by linguistic phenomena, and that the sole motivation for these attempts seems to be the presupposition that the functioning of these expressions must be analyzable by the semantic resources of the predicate calculus. Black mentions only plural definite descriptions and conjunctions of names as examples of plural referring expressions. The expressions he mentions as plural referring ones are those mentioned by van Peter van Inwagen; nowhere does he mention the idea that common nouns function occasionally as plural referring expressions. The use of such plural referring expressions surely exists in natural language, and at least much of it can be maintained without entailing any logical incoherence.
