Higher-order plurality: To what degree?

Abstract

Recent work by Grimau (2020) and Buccola et al. (2021) has rekindled the debate on the extent to which natural language allows for the construction of higher-order (or structured) pluralities (HOPs) — that is, pluralities of pluralities (Link, 1983; Landman, 1989; Schwarzschild,1996). Over the decades, research on HOP has focused on ordinary entity-denoting plurals, yet the typology of semantic entities is generally assumed to be diverse (Rett, 2022), arguably including events, worlds, times, degrees, and more. At least some of these domains arguably have the same or similar mereology as the ordinary entity domain, most famously events (Bach, 1986), and more recently degrees (Dotlačil and Nouwen, 2015). A natural question that arises is: do any of these other semantic entities allow for HOP? I argue that the answer is yes, using reciprocal degree constructions as a case study (cf. Schwarz, 2007; Hsieh, 2021).