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... Mehr ...