In Paul Dekker (Ed) Proceedings of the 12th Amsterdam Colloquium. 1999
In this paper we analyse ``split'' conjunction within DPs, as found in English examples such as (a) and (b).
(a) that man and woman
(b) those cats and dogs
We demonstrate that many of the well-studied Western European languages allow plural split conjunction (b) but not singular (a); in these languages DP-internal singular conjunction can only have the intersective ``joint'' reading possible also in English examples like (c)
(c) my friend and colleague
We show that the operation of ``set product'' (union over each possible n-tuple across n conjuncts) can be used to define conjunction in a way that derives all the available readings. In order to explain their cross-linguistic distribution we propose a minimal difference between languages in the way they obtain the denotation of a singular noun phrase. Taken together, these ideas yield a syntactic and semantic theory of conjunction which can not only account for the DP data but also explain the distributivity properties of different conjoined categories.