Inclusive plurals and the theory of number
Luisa Marti
April 2018 

I argue that an account of both inclusive plurals (Dvorak and Sauerland 2006, Farkas and de Swart 2010, Grimm 2012, Ivlieva 2013, Krifka 1989, 1995, Mayr 2015, Lasersohn 1998, 2011, Sauerland 2003, Sauerland, Anderssen and Yatsushiro 2005, Spector 2007, Yatsushiro, Sauerland and Alexiadou 2017, Zweig 2009) and the cross-linguistic typology of grammatical number (Harbour 2014) requires the postulation of 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 cross-linguistic typology of number, Harbour (2014), theories in which the exclusive plural DPs of a language with inclusive plurals are [−atomic]-less undergenerate 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 (building on Mayr 2015).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003528 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Inquiry, 51, 1, 37-74
keywords:	inclusive and exclusive plurals, dual, paucal, semantics, morphology
previous versions:	v5 [November 2017] v4 [June 2017] v3 [June 2017] v2 [June 2017] v1 [June 2017]
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