ABSTRACT
Logical analysis generally proceeds by paraphrasing sentences of natural language in a way that provides a more perspicuous representation of logically relevant features of those sentences. In linguistics, an influential approach to plurals is that of Godehard Link, who uses mereological sums to analyze plurals. This chapter introduces a formal language that may be used to regiment a wide range of natural language uses of plurals. George Boolos championed an approach to plurals that completely rejects Frege's attempt to render plural discourse in terms of "wholes." The requirement of topic-neutrality is based on a simple, intuitive idea, namely that logical principles should be applicable to reasoning about any subject matter. A standard way of making the condition precise is to claim that logical principles are those that remain true no matter how the non-logical expressions of the language are reinterpreted.
