Unknown numbers

Abstract

Seemingly simple sentence like ‘Sue had three husbands’ have a reading that cannot be explained by standard scope mechanisms such as quantifier raising (Szabó 2011; Francez 2018). On this so-called summative reading, ‘three husbands’ is neither de re nor de dicto w.r.t. the past tense operator. Rather, the numeral appears to take independent scope: there are three individuals such that for each of these it is the case that there was a time in the past such that person became Sue’s husband. Solutions to this puzzle tend to stipulate an interpretation of the numeral that allows it to take exceptional scope using familiar devices like quantifier raising (e.g. Francez 2018). Here I explore the value of an entirely different route. Given the fact that numerals can be adjective-like, summative readings could be an instance of exceptional adjectival scope (Abusch 1997). That is, the phenomenon could be parallel to the weird scope-taking of ‘unknown’ in sentences like ‘The suspect stayed in an unknown hotel’. The resulting analysis will not be very far removed from non-restrictive or post-suppositional analyses of numerals that have been proposed in the literature (e.g. Solt 2009; Brasoveanu 2013). This analysis has the advantage of being able to account for readings that are simultaneously summative and cumulative. However, I also show how all proposals tend to predict that summative readings are much more common than they in fact are.