ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a more radical claim, which does disagree with some of these semantic claims of Frege's. It argues that in many cases, common nouns in quantified noun phrases are not predicative, but plural referring expressions. The chapter tries to show that there is a prima facie good case for taking some common nouns in quantified noun phrases to be plural referring expressions. It explains various linguistic and semantic phenomena and examines and rejects Frege's reasons and arguments for his analysis of common nouns in quantified noun phrases as predicative, as well as some additional arguments mentioned by Russell. The chapter starts with prima facie reasons for considering common nouns in some quantified noun phrases as plural referring expressions. Starting with Frege's Begriffsschrift, it has commonly been maintained that despite linguistic appearances, the copula, or the copulative structure, has different meanings in singular and quantified subject-predicate sentences.
