Viola Schmitt (Vienna)
Cumulativity across intensional interveners
I investigate cumulative readings of sentences in which some, but not all of the plural expressions have a de dicto reading, i.e. where the lower plural is interpreted in the scope of an attitude verb. I argue that such cases represent a problem for accounts where cumulativity is derived by cumulating relations between the pluralities involved, because the required input 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 Schmitt 2018, Haslinger & Schmitt 2018, 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.