This Friday (April 8), fifth-year graduate student Karl DeVries will present his research on “Cumulative readings of bare cardinal partitives” in S-Circle:
Sentences like (1) have played a modest role in the literature on partitives, appearing in lists of sentences counter-exemplifying the partitive constraint (roughly, that the inner DP must be definite).
(1) That book could belong to one of three people (Ladusaw 1982).
There are two strategies for reconciling bare cardinal partitives with the partitive constraint. Ladusaw (1982) argues that the inner cardinal is a specific indefinite and Barker (1998) suggests that bare cardinal partitives can also be used when the inner cardinal exhausts the restrictor set; (2) has such an interpretation.
(2) Sybil is one of three people Otis admires.
Sentences like (3) suggest that matters are more complex. When a bare cardinal partitive appears in the scope of a universal quantifier it can give rise to a cumulative reading.
(3) Every student read one of three papers. (i.e. every student read one paper and three papers were read overall)
Sentence (3) does not require that the inner cardinal be specific nor does it require that there be only three (contextually salient) papers. I develop a compositional account of cumulative readings using an extension of First Order Logic with Choice (Brasoveanu and Farkas 2011) and discuss how cumulative readings fit into larger debates about the status of the partitive constraint.
As usual, S-Circle will start at 2 pm in the LCR.
