Syntactic conditions on cumulative readings of German jeder ‘every’ DPs

Abstract

English every-DPs can have cumulative readings relative to plural DPs, but only under severe syntactic constraints. This paper discusses different potential formulations of these constraints for the German correlate of every-DPs, jed-DPs. We argue that existing ‘surface-oriented’ hypotheses face empirical problems and propose a new hypothesis, namely that the availability of a cumulative reading relative to another plural X is sensitive to all positions in the derivational chain of X. We then spell out one possible semantic analysis of this pattern and sketch the consequences of this hypothesis for future empirical work.