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...shed no new light on the availability of long-distance scope readings (cf. Fodor and Sag 1982 and much subsequent literature). In the vast literature on indefinites (see, among many others, Farkas 1981; Ludlow & Neale 1991; Ruys 1992; Winter 1997, 2001a, 2005; Kratzer 1998), indefinites containing unmodified cardinals (three birds, four books, etc.) have been shown to behave much like indefinites headed by a or some with respect to exceptional scope-taking abilities. Like a- and some-indefinites, cardinal indefinites can therefore be analyzed as choice functions. We can follow the analysis of Winter (2001a, 2005), where the existential force of indefinites comes from a phonologically null choice function operator in D0. Combined with our semantics this yields the structure in (16). !16" On this proposal, a choice function f applies to the set of all plural individuals x, such that each x is divisible into two non-overlapping 322 The Composition of Complex Cardinals at U niversity of C hicago Library on January 5, 2011 jos.oxfordjournals.org D ow nloaded from individuals, each of which is a bird, and returns a single such x. A DP such as two birds thus has type e: it is a plural individual (con...

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...erspecification proposal it is open whether NQNPs have a unilateral or bilateral interpretation and only extra-linguistic, pragmatic principles are the determining factor. Now it could be argued (see =-=Winter 2001-=-) that where there are two logically related candidate interpretations of an expression, the interpretation which is favoured, ceteris paribus, is that which makes the overall proposition expressed lo...

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...uages bear out this expectation quites7 For example, Link, Schein, Landman, and Winter do not discuss interaction with negation.s8 As the reviewer points out, The birds are above and below the cloud (=-=Winter 2001-=-) seems like ascounterexample to Homogeneity. Whether it is depends on whether one’s theory admits or rejects separatescumulative readings. Winter’s does not. Beck and Sauerland (2000) argue that cumu...

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... of the relation expressed by the reciprocal scope when restricted to the group argument. Subsequent work has suggested to extend the application of the SMH for treating other phenomena with plurals (=-=Winter, 2001-=-), prepositions (Zwarts, 2003) and quantification (Blutner, Hendriks, & de Hoop, 2003). Unfortunately, the SMH makes the wrong predictions in complex sentences such as (3) I doubt that the girls saw e...

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...an be ordered in strength should treat the utterance as if it carried the strongest of those meanings. This would align our proposal with other work that has argued for a strongest meaning hypothesis =-=[1, 27]-=-.‘Might’ Made Right 20 Let us look a bit closer at the case where Billy cannot rule out the prejacent on the basis of his information. Obviously, he will confirm the bem (You’re right). Which reading...

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...al constraint on interpretation that applies to other structures, not just to presuppositions. These other structures include reciprocals, discussed in Dalrymple et al. (1991) and plural predication (=-=Winter, 2001-=-). If this could be shown, it would make a stronger case for the IP. However, Geurts shows that while the IP may be able to explain some other non-presuppositional phenomena, it clearly makes wrong pr...

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...s hypothesis states that plural predicates receive an interpretation using “the logically strongest truth conditions . . . that are not contradicted by known properties of the singular predicate(s)” (=-=Winter 2001-=-, p. 342). Intersective conjunction is stronger than cumulative conjunction, because (the characterizing set of) the intersective conjunction of predicates is a subset of (the characterizing set of) t...

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... by our account. In section 6, we discuss Schein’s (2003) 6 The puzzling status of (4) had already been noted by Fiengo & Lasnik 1973; Langendoen 1978, and more recently by Sauerland 1998; Beck 2001; =-=Winter 2001-=-; Sabato & Winter 2012. 7 This is a variant of an example from Sauerland (1998). The original example reads ‘#My mother and I procreated each other’. The problem with the original example is that ‘??M...

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...ation, along the lines of (20), the question of how one chooses between these two possibilities arises immediately. We have noted above that the exclusive interpretation asymmetrically entails the inclusive one. This, we claim, makes the choice between the two interpretations sensitive to the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis. In this section we make this connection explicit and discuss its predictions. Recall that Dalrymple, Kanazawa, Kim, Mchombo & Peters (1998) propose the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH) to account for the contextual choice between a range of interpretations for reciprocals. Winter (2001) extends the principle to instances of Boolean conjunction and quantification. Zwarts (2004) exploits the SMH as part of his interpretation procedure for the preposition round. We exploit here the same idea in claiming that the SMH 6:27 Farkas and de Swart is one of the factors that govern the choice between the inclusive and the exclusive sum interpretation of plural nominals. The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis applies when an expression is assigned a set of interpretations ordered by entailment and chooses the strongest element of this set that is compatible with the context.17 The two senses ...