Inclusive Plurals and the Theory of Number
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Luisa Martí [1]
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[1] School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
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- Localización: Linguistic inquiry, ISSN 0024-3892, Vol. 51, Nº 1, 2020, págs. 37-74
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
I argue that an account of both inclusive plurals and the crosslinguistic typology of grammatical number requires postulating a [−atomic] feature (or something very much like it) in the structure of exclusive-plural DPs. When combined with the only theory we currently have that accounts for the crosslinguistic typology of number (Harbour 2014), theories in which the exclusive-plural DPs of a language with inclusive plurals are [−atomic]-less under- or overgenerate with respect to that typology. These problems disappear as soon as the structure of exclusive plural DPs contains a component that generates exclusive-plural interpretations, either Harbour’s [−atomic] feature (added to a system with a second, [−atomic]-less structure, a proposal compatible with, e.g., Farkas and de Swart 2010) or a predicate-level exhaustivity operator (from Mayr 2015).
