Meaning of superplural | Babel Free

Definitions

A term, word, etc., that describes a plurality greater than another plural.

also, attributive

Examples

“The singular number, I understand, denotes one, and the plural more than one, but to describe the number of flies we have here would require a super-plural. It is not that we have merely 'more than one'—we have myriads of flies.”

“[§ 41, page 45] Some nouns of singular form, already producing plural reactions may be further given plural suffixes; it is convenient to call these forms "super-plurals." […] [page 454] It appears that Super-plurals do not denote a large quantity of matter in one place, but a number of lots of matter in different places, e.g. grain collected or growing on different people's holdings.”

“There are, of course, no super-plural terms or quantifiers in English, but I would like to suggest the relevant semantic category is nonetheless legitimate: super-plural quantifiers are to third-order quantifiers what plural quantifiers are to second-order quantifiers.”

“[Agustín] Rayo (2006) develops an alternative that allows for absolutely unrestricted quantification. It consists in using languages that contain not only plural terms, but also terms that are "superplural", "super-superplural", etc. […] A superplural term may refer to several "pluralities". […] As we will show, in order to specify the truth-conditions of sentences containing mass nouns and plurals, we will need to be able to refer to several "pluralities". We will do so using superplural terms.”

“A natural question that arises is whether the step from the singular to the plural can be iterated. Are there terms that stand to ordinary plural terms the way ordinary plural terms stand to singular terms? Let's call such terms superplural. A superplural term would thus, loosely speaking, refer to several 'pluralities' at once, much as an ordinary plural term refers to several objects at once. Further, let's call a predicate superplural if it can be predicated of superplural terms.”

“The considerations presented in this paper generalize, and should therefore support the view that the truthmaking predicate can take plural predicates of any order (possibly including infinite order), that is, not just superplural arguments, but also super-superplural arguments, and so on. It should also be noted that they also support the view that the truth-making predicate takes plural predicates of 'mixed order'. For instance, what makes (Aristotle exists and Socrates resembles Plato) true is Aristotle together with Socrates and Plato together. 'Aristotle together with Socrates and Plato together' (or 'Aristotle and (Socrates and Plato)') would be a superplural expression of 'mixed order', since it is obtained combining a singular and a first-order plural expression. I am indebted to Øystein Linnebo for alerting me to the points in this footnote.”

“Our formalization thus brings out the fact that treating plurally exhaustive description involves dipping one's toes in the murky waters of the superplural. We can avoid total immersion, however, by confining ourselves to the phenomena that are expressible in our mother tongue. Everyone knows that it is not adequate to the apparatus of superplural quantification, since it has no superplural forms of pronouns or common nouns, no 'theys' and 'thems' to follow 'they' and 'them', and no 'thingss' or 'mens' to follow 'things' and 'men'.”

“All ways of talking about higher-order multitudes, where a many is one of a higher many, get into grammatical difficulties because all (or nearly all) languages lack superplurals, or pluplurals. But logically, this is not the point. If it is legitimate to accept that plurals designate collections, including multitudes, in the first place, then similar considerations apply to superplurals, and so to higher-order collections and multitudes at any level.”

“Barngarla has singular, dual, plural and what I call super'''plural. Consider the following: mína 'eye', mínalbili 'two eyes', mínarri 'eyes' and mínailyarranha 'heaps of eyes'.”

“Superplurals would permit the formulation of a higher-order version of [Georg] Cantor's theorem; they would help with the elimination of mereology and second-order logic in favor of plural logic; and they could be extensively used in semantics, […] Can the step from the singular to the plural be iterated? Is there such a thing as the superplural that stands to the plural the way the plural stands to the singular? Some examples from natural language suggest an affirmative answer.”

CEFR level