Cumulativity without plural projection

Abstract

It has been proposed that the part structures of denotations of plurals ‘project’ to the denotations of expressions including those plurals (e.g., Gawron and Kehler 2004, Kubota and Levine 2016, Schmitt 2019/2020). If such a plural projection is possible, not only plural DPs but also expressions including those plural DPs denote pluralities (e.g., type the two recipes denotes a plurality {TYPE(recipe1),TYPE(recipe2)} instead of a singularity {TYPE({recipe1,recipe2})}). One piece of support for plural projection comes from Schmitt’s (2019) observation about a type of cumulativity. In this paper, I examine a wider range of such cumulativity, and show that a source of cumulativity in the literature (e.g., Krifka 1989, Kratzer 2007) can capture all the relevant cumulativity data without plural projection while an analysis with plural projection can capture only a proper subset of those data. Therefore, this paper concludes that the relevant cumulativity does not support the need of plural projection.