Abstract

This paper investigates cumulative readings of sentences in which some, but not all of the plural expressions have a de dicto reading, i.e. sentences where the lower plural is interpreted in the scope of an attitude verb like believe. I argue that such cases represent a problem for existing accounts of cumulativity, because the required cumulative relation cannot be formed. I then motivate and propose an alternative analysis where all plural expressions are interpreted in situ: I expand the ‘plural projection’ framework put forth by Haslinger & Schmitt (2018, 2019), Schmitt (2019), where embedded pluralities ‘project’ to the denotations of higher nodes in the sense that the latter reflect the part-structure of the former and where cumulativity is derived via a compositional rule in a step-by-step fashion. I show that if the denotations of the plurals with the de dicto construal are analyzed as pluralities of individual concepts, which project in the afore-mentioned sense to pluralities of propositions, the data can be explained straightforwardly. This proposal differs from treatments in terms of collective belief that don’t appeal to pluralities of propositions ( Pasternak 2018a, b), in that it (i) arguably generalizes to a larger number of examples and (ii) links grammatical plurality in the embedded clause to the availability of cumulative readings.

中文翻译：

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跨态度和复数投影的累积

摘要

本文研究了某些（但不是全部）复数表达具有决定性阅读的句子的累积阅读，即，较低的复数在态度动词（如believe）的范围内被解释的句子。我认为这种情况对于现有的累积性问题是一个问题，因为无法形成所需的累积关系。然后，我提出并提出了一种替代分析方法，其中所有复数表达式都在原位进行解释：我扩展了Haslinger＆Schmitt（2018，2019），Schmitt（2019）提出的``多个投影''框架，其中将多个``投影''嵌入到较高节点的表示中，因为后者反映了较高的节点的部分结构前者，累积性是通过组成规则以逐步方式导出的。我表明，如果复数的表示具有决定性意义解释结构作为多个单独的概念进行分析，这些概念在上述意义上投射为多个命题，因此可以直接解释数据。该建议与集体信念的处理方式不同，后者不适合于多重主张（Pasternak 2018a，b），因为它（i）可以概括为大量示例，并且（ii）将语法复数形式链接到嵌入式累积读数的可用性条款。